REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Cinema
Too true to be good
[Kenneth Robinson
The Panic in Needle Park. Director: Jerry Schatzberg Stars: Al Pacino, Kitty Winn 'X' Berkeley One (110 mins).
Does this film glamorise the world of drug-addicts and drop-outs? Of Course it does. It was made not as an awful warning but as a commercial proposition. A television documentary on the subject could be as appalling to look at as watching real junkies in action. But a feature film has to have fairly attractive characters, a well-written plot and some nice camerawork. By the time the director and his cast have made a professional Job of their theme they are inevitably glorifying the life-style of hippies. Not for you or for me, of course. Nor for the other 'pathetic old People' (I quote my teenage daughter) who moralise about the Y°1-Ing. To us there still seems more sense in starting life with any kind 13,.f a job, conforming to the 11..amework of society's rules and unding some sort of escape within the framework.
The moment I wrote that I realised how pious it would sound to a rebellious teenager. Even I, in the early twilight of my life, can see Why the camaraderie of the drop°Las brings in more converts every Y. This is something that is well expressed in the film. The Needle e.ark of the title is a road intersection in down-town New York Which hippies have made into their t)wn outdoor headquarters. Like all Places of its kind it has a hold on
habitués and fascinates newcomers. It is a club where addicts return after a night of hooking or thieving. But it is also a club whose members have no loyalty to each other. Their selfish way of living has turned them into self-seeking egocentrics. Their meeting-place has something of the atmosphere of a theatre greenroom. The individuals gather together to confirm to themselves that they belong, in some way, to society. But what each is looking for is so unpredictable that he is withdrawn and suspicious, and likely to be treacherous to his mates.
All this is merely suggested in the film. What it shows very clearly is a couple being dragged down by a life they have embarked on for a bit of fun. The boy (Al Pacino) is already on the fringe of Needle Park activities when he takes his respectable girl-friend (Kitty Winn) to meet the crowd. She is amused by his petty thieving. At first she is only mildly interested in his occasional injections. And then, as he becomes dependent on drugs, searching telephone-boxes for money to buy another fix, she herself takes a needle-jab out of curiosity.
From then the couple's way is clear to them. They know they must escape. but the drug in their bodies leads the boy into prison and the girl on to the streets. They are re-united and in one idyllic, pastoral scene they know the sort of people they would like to be. But the need for drugs — and particularly the need to take equal amounts so they remain tuned to each other's moods — leads the boy back to prison. The film ends with the girl waiting for him, so they can set off yet again towards self-destruction.
This film was banned when it was first available here four years ago. It was thought that young people would want to copy what they saw. But if this was true in 1971 it is equally true today. Although hard drugs are more expensive and more difficult to get than they were then, the way of life that goes with them is on the increase. There are fewer raving junkies for the police to deal with, but more drop-outs and squatters. The light-hearted it-responsibility that brings the film's lovers together in Needle Park is a disease now eating into real-life families and schools.
In a sense the Needle Park film is already old-fashioned. What I would prefer to see is a film that tries to show exactly why young people opt for this sort of life. The picture deals only with the way the characters acquire their 'freedom.' It does not attempt to explain what they think they are up to. Yet drop-outs can be quite lucid about their apparent perversity. Their arguments against normal behaviour — even against the development of talent — have a terrible Lewis Carroll logic about them. These arguments are something we need to understand.
I'm not suggesting that the cinema should be an instrument of propaganda to turn us all into amateur welfare officers. I am simply surprised that nobody has tried to express, on film, the reasons for our newest 'accidents of society' — as a policeman described them to me the other day.
I began by saying that this film glamorises the world of drug-addicts and drop-outs. I find it horrifying that it can be seen all over London by hundreds of fifteen-year-olds. It is, of course, designed only for over-eighteens. But if you believe anyone bothers about that sort of thing you should queue up for the cinema behind my fifteen-year-old daughter and her friends. The 'X' certificate is nonsense. And because it is nonsense it is a pity that this film should be screened at all. The horrors it shows are not bad enough to cancel out the lure of a kind of freedom. What it fails to put over at all are the side-effects of the drop-outs' way of living, including diseased bodies and dying minds.
There has been some outraged publicity about the scene where a needle is discharged into a vein in lingering close-ups. The important thing here is the dialogue. As we are forced to look at the method used to warp and destroy immature minds we hear the young people in the background vowing everlasting love to each other. They are still keeping the vow at the end of the picture. It is then that the earlier unpleasant scene suddenly has greater meaning.
This is a clever film. I'm very sorry it was made. It is too true to be good.
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