What’s most interesting about Al Pacino’s memoir, Sonny Boy, is that it doesn’t exclusively center on the 11-year span in which his resume was spotless. While Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson had a few forgettable titles spaced in between their masterpieces, Pacino’s momentum was consistent until it suddenly evaporated. After William Friedkin’s Cruising was hit with both accusations of salaciousness and critical disdain, Pacino transformed into someone known for doing the “most acting,” but not necessarily the best. Sea of Love, Dick Tracy, and even his Oscar-winning performance in Scent of a Woman are the result of an actor given free rein.
Perhaps a generation of younger cinephiles know Pacino exclusively as the belligerent coach from Any Given Sunday or the slippery demon of The Devil’s Advocate, and not the quiet, bookish theater actor who Francis Ford Coppola had to beg Paramount to cast in The Godfather, as executives preferred a seasoned star in the vein of Ryan O’Neal or Burt Reynolds. This version of Pacino may have etched his name in Hollywood history when Michael Corleone arrived for his sister’s fateful wedding, but he rose to prominence a year prior in the harrowing independent drama The Panic in Needle Park.
The 1966 novel by James Mills that inspired the film was groundbreaking because it treated heroin addiction as a reality, and not as an issue. Given that the ratings board had only recently loosened, Hollywood wasn’t experienced in the depiction of these nuances. Midnight Cowboy earned the dreaded X-Rating due to the mere mention of prostitution and drug use, and Frank Sinatra’s subversive role in the addiction drama The Man With The Golden Arm was not able to even mention the drug by name.
Pacino’s performance as the protagonist of The Panic in Needle Park seemed contradictory when Jerry Schatzberg first took note of the up-and-coming star of Don Petersen's Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? The aimless drifter Bobby is a sly, good-natured heartthrob with no shortage of charm, but he was also a drug dealer. The perception that everyone that peddled heroin was a monster with a gang of henchmen was shattered; Pacino lent credibility to the concept of empathy for those that civil society had cast aside.
It’s no coincidence that Pacino found himself in the role of Marlon Brando’s son in The Godfather. Brando was also a theater kid whose raw intensity stood out amidst Laurence Olivier impersonators; A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront allowed him to play tragic figures whose ability to worsen their situations didn’t provide the same dramatic catharsis of a Shakespearean villain. Brando was also a classic heartthrob capable of the slapstick in Guys and Dolls or the swooning romance of Sayonara. Comparatively, Pacino was drawn to insecure characters who committed violence towards themselves.
While there’s an arc to Michael’s fall from grace in The Godfather, Bobby’s unpredictable in The Panic in Needle Park because his confused mental state has made him so erratic. He could be a selfless martyr willing to propose marriage to a young woman to end her cycle of self-abuse, but he could also be a repulsive burglar desperate to earn enough cash to take another hit. There are moments in which his inability to cope is borderline childish that are followed by sequences of confused paranoia. Pacino doesn’t show pity or contempt for Bobby, as the film leaves it up to the viewer as to how much of his pain is self-imposed.
Even if it was distributed by 20th Century Fox and made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival, The Panic in Needle Park spoke to the renegade generation that rejected the epic musicals, adventures, and westerns that defined the Golden Age of Hollywood. New York became a vibrant, dangerous prison in Schatzberg’s eyes, as the addicts that gathered in the titular pocket park of Sherman Square and Verdi Square assembled like inmates in the yard.
Pacino didn’t call attention to himself through the implication that Bobby’s experience was uniquely traumatic, and he erased any semblance of stardom to achieve complete realism. His ability to softly wither away onscreen was something that distinguished him among the other breakthroughs of the era; while it’s unlikely that Pacino would’ve been capable of the physical transformation required for Raging Bull, it's hard to imagine De Niro glazed by heroin at the epicenter of New York without it feeling like an athletic performance.
The Panic in Needle Park is often left out of assessment of Pacino’s body of work because of how unpleasant it is. While the sexual politics of Dog Day Afternoon or the depiction of law enforcement in Serpico can be addressed from a modern perspective, The Panic in Needle Park identified the underbelly of the American degree without feeling voyeuristic. The fact that Pacino never reached that level of despair later on in his career isn’t a slight on his subsequent acting choices, but an indication of how uniquely challenging The Panic in Needle Park was.