Panic in Needle Park (1969)

Al Pacino, Kitty Price
directed by Jerry Shatzberg

method acting at its best.  these kids knew what they were doing.

Panic in Needle Park is the definitive heroin movie.  It's even more definitive than Trainspotting, although that one wasn't so bad either.  It was a one hit wonder from former photojournalist Jerry Shatzberg, and featured Al Pacino in his first starring role.

This is probably the most psychologically traumatic film I have ever seen.  The movie is trying to make you very, very miserable, so miserable that you begin to feel physically sick.  This is not because the director is mean, but rather that he is trying to do something very difficult; he is trying to describe a life lost to addiction, he is trying to show how far people will degrade themselves just to get that single 'high'.  And he also shows why the reasons people want to get high.  Ingo Preminger did a pretty okay job ten years earlier in his Man With the Golden Arm, but Shatzberg one takes it a few steps further.

This could have easily been tacky and trite and awful like some of those blaxploitation movies coming out around the same time, but it wasn't.  I don't know if it was because Shatzberg knew his characters and evinced a certain sympathy for them (the people shooting up are... really shooting up), or because the acting talent was straight-up incredible.  I wonder too if it had something to do with the zeitgeist of the times; people were broke and frustrated, and really learned to make it work with what they had.  Pacino especially exudes restlessness.  There's a spirit of rebellion through these 70's films which I admire so much.