With a career that's spanned over fifty features, Al Pacino is without doubt one of the greatest actors of his, or anyone else's, generation. And it all started here in his first leading role in 1971.

But it wasn't just Pacino breaking through, as both his director Jerry Schatzberg and his leading lady Kitty Winn were also just starting out in their respective careers. But don't let the lack of experience fool you, as all involved helped create a film with real depth and character.

In the early seventies, where Broadway met 72nd Street on the West Side of NYC, was an area known as Sherman Square. To the locals who hung out there however, it was known as Needle Park, due to the number of junkies that frequented it. Bobby (Pacino) was one such junkie.

Bobby is a happy-go-lucky type of guy, who does what he has to, to get enough for a fix. This will usually involve some light-fingeredness of the possessions of others. Helen (Winn) is an artist, accustomed to hanging out with fellow bohemians, but like a moth drawn to the proverbial flame, she soon finds herself attracted to the enigmatic Bobby.

At first Helen doesn't pay much attention to Bobby's drug-taking; instead she prefers to just hang on the periphery of Bobby's junkie group. All this changes however, when she dabbles just the once, and like so many before her, finds herself shortly an addict.

With both of them now addicted, the pair go on a journey, with one of them proving to be more of a destructive force than the other.

Are you lookin' at me? Are you lookin' at- wait, that's not my line?!

It's no surprise that Pacino was attracted by the stark material; it gave him the opportunity to flex his acting muscle at a very early stage in his career, and to good effect. It was his bold performance here that helped De Palma cast him in The Godfather. And as they say, from that point on, the rest was history. It may well have gone in another direction however if Schatzberg had decided to cast another young actor who auditioned for the part – a certain Bob De Niro.

Maybe it had something to do with Schatzberg's background in photography that helped give the film its grittiness. The film is almost shot as a documentary, with the camera rolling seemingly capturing the lives of these youngsters on the street falling apart, accompanied by a soundtrack solely consisting of the sounds of the city. It was probably this rawness that saw the film initially banned in the UK at the time of its release.

The young Pacino gives a startling performance; he injects a heady mix of sparkling charm and personality into his role, leaving you in no doubt why Winn's character falls head over heels for him. But he doesn't have it all his own way though; Winn's character goes on a far more dramatic journey, one that the young actress handles with deft sensitivity. So much so that she won Best Actress at Canne in '71.

Although Pacino has failed to deliver that killer performance in recent years, there will always be evidence from his past, as shown with The Panic in Needle Park, that reminds us that he truly is one of kind.