The Panic in Needle Park: No Music
Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park has finally come out on DVD, 36 years after its theatrical release. Warning: this movie is a scabrously realistic story about junkies, with close-up shots of needles entering flesh. So if you can’t handle this sort of thing (and I don’t blame you if you can’t) cross this movie off your list. Not a date movie, not an entertainment, not for kids.
This is the one that kicked off Al Pacino’s career, and it’s easy to see why Coppola picked him for The Godfather. Pacino’s performance is smart and wily and truthful: qualities of a good actor; and he’s also charismatic: or whatever that quality is that makes a good actor into a movie star (and which has made lots of severely limited actors into movie stars).
The unsentimental script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (based on a novel by James Mills) tells a simple story: unmotivated nice girl from the Midwest meets old-school New York hustler, they fall in love, they get hooked on heroin. Most of the movie tells the even simpler daily saga of the drug addict: getting dope, getting high, getting more dope. There’s a bit of plot having to do with one of the lovers betraying the other to the cops in order to avoid jail-time. Love prevails in this movie, but it does not prevail over heroin. And that’s about it; no great revelation, no slambang ending, no cathartic tears from the stars and no swelling John Williams strings, no music at all. Jerry Schatzberg (who before he made movies was a successful fashion and celebrity-portrait photographer) tells the story without tricks, putting the camera on the actors and allowing the actors to create a reality with him. He does not indulge in late-60s-early-70s “daring technique†— no jump-cuts or fast cuts, no strobe flashes, no “psychedelic†effects, no rapid zooms, none of the shit that sometimes charmingly dates so many movies from that time. And when I said no music I wasn’t speaking metaphorically: Schatzberg uses no music score at all, but unlike with some scoreless European movies where the lack of music makes you miss the music (or something, anything to relieve the tedium), in this movie you might not even notice its lack; music would have added something this movie didn’t need: cues to tell us how to feel. Schatzberg takes it a step further: there is not even a note of “source†music in this movie, not a passing car radio, nothing. The only background score is the grimy white noise of New York traffic.
This is the non-chic heroin world of unwashed clothing and clammy sweat, of scummy apartments, of cheap diners where junkies nurse paper cups of coffee between now and the next hit. They huddle together nodding or hurting on a bench on a concrete island on Broadway as the out-of-focus straight world goes past them and around them. And again, real needles puncture real skin. A director willing to go this intense might well have gone the neo-realistic, Robert Bresson route of using non-actors, but I’m thankful Schatzberg gave the main roles to talented and daring professional actors. Pacino, Kitty Wynn, Richard Bright, Alan Vint, all give realistic performances, but they give performances. They give life to the talking pictures on the screen; each actor lives a man or woman’s life onscreen.
The Panic in Needle Park was made in that strange period, roughly from the late 60s to the late 70s, when American filmmakers could attempt to make movies as works of art and actually complete them and see them released. A lot of bad movies were made by people attempting to make art, but also this movie was made, and The Godfather, and Five Easy Pieces, and Mean Streets, and The Last Detail, and Schatzberg’s later Scarecrow, also with Pacino; fill in your own favorites. Of just the above-mentioned movies the only one I can see being made readily in today’s world would be The Godfather, and with any luck at best Steven Spielberg would make it, and it would probably be okay but it wouldn’t be great. I think that if Coppola himself were making that movie today it would probably be okay, but not great. Mean Streets might get made today but it would be straight-to-DVD and starring a couple of earnest pretty-boys from TV. Sometimes there are times when an art flowers up all at once. Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. James Joyce and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner. The Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys and Dylan and Hendrix. Coltrane and Davis and Monk and Rollins.
I’ve been looking forward to this movie’s DVD release for years. After watching it last night I do not want to watch it again soon, but that’s not a knock by any means. This isn’t Drugstore Cowboy; that was a good movie, but it was also an entertainment movie. I really liked Larry Clark’s Another Day in Paradise, but besides being a good movie about junkies, that was also an entertainment movie. Ditto The Man With the Golden Arm. The Panic in Needle Park is not an entertainment, but it is something that only a few American movies a year are nowadays: it’s a work of art.
Oh, one last warning; it’s a double-sided DVD, full-screen on one side, widescreen on the other, so don’t be an idiot like me: check the Antman print on the disc before you put it in and start bitching about the pan-and-scan.
(This has been a Selmur Productions exclusive for Newcritics; check out my joint for some lighter fare.)
Boy, this is the kind of movie I would have loved when I was younger. But, the older I get, the harder they are to watch.
I’m not sure if I’ve seen this or not.
I love that photo, though at the top. Love it.