Mirrors (1978)

Call them the unwanted children of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973)—various ’70s thrillers, some theatrical releases and some made for TV, about women bedeviled by supernatural forces. Among the least impressive examples is Mirrors, which has a connection to one of the aforementioned blockbusters because Mirrors leading lady Kitty Winn played a supporting role in The Exorcist. Although she’s a capable actress who periodically imbues moments with clarity and sensitivity, there’s a reason why Winn never became an above-the-title name, and that reason is on display throughout Mirrors. She often seems lost, as if she either doesn’t know what the script demands of her at that particular juncture, or knows but isn’t up to the challenge. Part of the blame, of course, must fall on the film’s director, Noel Black, whose career slid into mediocrity after his wonderful debut, Pretty Poison (1968). Black’s direction of Mirrors was unquestionably impeded by a poor script, but no matter the circumstances, his storytelling is borderline inept, and he evinces little flair for rendering jolts and suspense. Anyway, here’s the story. Marianne (Winn) and her husband, Philip (Peter Donat), visit New Orleans. He has asthma. She experiences weird visions, most of which involve mirrors, and she crosses paths with weirdos including an overly solicitous hotel manager. These folks belong to a voodoo cult of some sort. Philip dies, ostensibly of his asthma, but really, Marianne fears, because of her having angered the occult types. Her conspiracy theories land her in an insane asylum. The story never quite starts, instead lugubriously wandering through various suggestive episodes until viewers realize this is as good as it’s going to get, and it never quite ends, instead just sort of stopping, perhaps because Black ran out of ways to photograph mirrors. Actually, scratch that. He exhausts his visual imagination well before the movie sputters to a halt. As goes the direction, so goes this dull and unmemorable movie overall.

Mirrors: LAME

The Panic in Needle Park (1971)

          If you’re a fan of ’70s cinema, you owe The Panic in Needle Park a major debt of gratitude—Al Pacino’s performance in this movie convinced director Francis Ford Coppola that Pacino could handle the leading role in The Godfather. So, without this gloomy study of heroin addicts living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, we would never have seen Pacino’s sublime work as Michael Corleone. Yet Needle Park is a worthwhile film beyond its cinema-history significance. Written by the posh literary couple Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (from a novel by James Mills), and directed in a gritty verité style by photographer-turned-filmmaker Jerry Schatzberg, Needle Park is painful and sad, a sonnet to wandering souls who search for themselves in the oblivion of hard drugs. Presented without music and unfolding over a leisurely 110-minute running time, the movie is unrelentingly ugly—characters abuse each other and themselves; injections are shown in excruciating close-ups; and so on. Even by the anything-goes standards of ’70s cinema, this is a brutal depiction of misery without promise of salvation.
          Pacino stars as Bobby, a fast-talking hustler who gets by on dealing, handouts, and petty crime while nursing a heavy habit. One afternoon, he meets a pretty young woman named Helen (Kitty Winn), whom he draws into his orbit with compliments and jokes and kindness. Other characters populating Bobby’s dangerous world include his older brother, Hank (Richard Bright), a professional thief who uses heroin periodically, and a narc named Hotch (Alan Vint), who sees Bobby as a tool for catching major suppliers. Once Helen takes the inevitable step of shooting up for the first time, she starts a spiral down into prostitution. Meanwhile, she and Bobby are so detached from reality they can’t see they’re killing each other—Bobby becomes a full-time dealer in order to keep them both stoned, and Helen sacrifices her dignity by returning to Bobby again and again, despite several near-death experiences.

          Pacino’s performance is alternately explosive and poignant, his streetwise swagger clashing with his tiny physical stature, and he’s persuasive whether he’s sharing tenderness with Winn or simulating drugged states. Winn, a naturalistic, theater-trained actress whose limited filmography also includes a supporting role in The Exorcist (1973), delicately moves between being our window into this depressing world and incarnating the tragic emotions of those who love unwisely. To a certain degree, however, the film’s dirty locations are the main attraction—viewed through Schatzberg’s long lenses during exterior sequences and observed more closely during interior scenes, the sordid textures of low-rent Manhattan speak volumes about the fragile lives of addicts.

The Panic in Needle Park: GROOVY