The Panic in Needle Park (1971)

Shot in a loose, semi-improvised style, the film strains for physical details—the process of shooting up, from mapping out a usable vein to the rush of a needle hitting home, is graphically documented—yet it is the offhand emotional moments that linger, like the quietly devastating instant that Bobby hugs Helen and notices for the first time that she’s become a junkie like him.

— Fernando F. Croce (Slant Magazine)

Like the rest of the film, [Pacino] is ultimately hampered as well as served by the dictates of a generalized, sociological authenticity so that he is never allowed to pass beyond the familiar boundaries of an all-too-familiar type, a problem equally limiting to his co-star.

[…]

Seeking objectivity and distance in a love story about two addicts, Schatzberg treats his painful plot elliptically, cutting away from many of the obvious climaxes and moments of decision and usually catching his characters on the wing, making no attempt to plumb for motivations or arrive at moralistic conclusions. But somewhere along the way, his documentary impulse – showing all of the hows and none of the whys – becomes self-defeating. One is told that for several weeks before filming, Schatzberg screenwriters Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (the husband-and-wife team who wrote the film adaptation of the former’s novel, Play It As It Lays) and the leading actors all lived on location at Broadway and 72nd Street on Manhattan’s West Side, studiously absorbing facts and atmosphere like anthropologists from another continent. The fruits of these labors are evident throughout, bearing the earmarks of a conscientious case-study of all the descending circles in an addict’s inferno, from hustling to overdoses to betrayals in prison and back again. But none of them, alas, can tell us why we should care about the characters involved. To reach for that effect, the filmmakers have to throw their elliptical narrative and verisimilitude out the window by introducing a wholly sentimental incident — the accidental drowning of a newly-purchased puppy, when Bobby insists that he and his girl friend take their fixes en route on the Staten Island ferry, and the darling little pet conveniently scampers overboard right on cue. [Indeed, I] attended the press conference at Cannes for The Panic in Needle Park, and recall being disturbed by the heartlessness with which Didion and Dunne described their dispassionate and seemingly indifferent “research” about New York addicts.

— Jonathan Rosenbaum

“New York was no mere city,” Joan Didion wrote in Goodbye to All That, her brilliant if bitter 1967 screed about life in New York. “It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself . . . I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there.” Didion traffics in broken dreams, and for her they find their culmination in this city that she sees as incapable of meeting its romantic promise, this city that extracts a pound of flesh from swooning transplants and replaces it with anxiety, unfulfilled desire, or, in Helen’s case, heroin. The New York depicted in The Panic in Needle Park—from the Upper West Side to Harlem, from booking rooms and holding cells to the Staten Island Ferry—is all shards and rot, the remnants of a glittering dream long since washed into the gutter. That Helen once had a yard is meant to underscore her tragedy, and perhaps it does in that she, unlike Bobby, had a choice. But today, as the meth lab–addled Midwest gives urban powder rooms a run for their money and Manhattan has morphed into a benign if banal millionaire’s playground, we can see that it’s not the city that wrecks apple-cheeked innocents who dare to enter. Panic doesn’t live in parks; it lives in minds and hearts.

— Emily Condon (Reverse Shot)