{"id":16678,"date":"2021-06-16T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-16T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=16678"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:14:27","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:14:27","slug":"god-help-bobby-and-helen-panic-in-needle-park-at-50","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/god-help-bobby-and-helen-panic-in-needle-park-at-50\/","title":{"rendered":"God Help Bobby and Helen: Panic in Needle Park<\/i> at 50"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cGod help Bobby and Helen,\u201d reads the original poster. \u201cThey\u2019re in love in Needle Park.\u201d Helen (Kitty Winn) leans on Bobby (Al Pacino, in his first starring role), arm around his shoulder and eyes downcast; Bobby kisses her cheek. It\u2019s not clear from the still image of the poster if Helen is hanging onto him carefree and in love \u2013 a candid shot in motion as she laughs and moves \u2013 or if she\u2019s out of it and can barely stand. The film itself answers: both. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That multiplicity is the heart of The Panic in Needle Park <\/em>(released 50 years ago this week): it\u2019s both a drug story and a love story, not in parallel or even intersecting, but without ever stopping one thing to be the other. It opens with Helen on the subway, crushed by people on all sides, going back to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, Marco (Raul Julia, in his film debut). Helen is an aspiring artist who moved to New York from Indiana, and Winn plays her with a constant low-level uneasiness, like she\u2019s never quite sure of where she fits or what she\u2019s supposed to be doing. Roger Greenspun in the New York Times<\/em> <\/a>disparagingly said Winn \u201cproduces more facial expressions\u2014literally\u2014than the rest of the cast put together,\u201d but her super-expressive face is the film\u2019s engine and its through-line, the thing that everything else moves around. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the start of the film, she\u2019s just had a back-alley abortion. When she starts haemorrhaging, Marco\u2019s drug dealer shows unexpected care: this is Bobby, a giddy, amiable small-time hustler, who lies his way into the hospital just to see her and make her laugh. It\u2019s obvious why Helen falls for him. Roger Ebert wrote<\/a> that she \u201cadmires his cockiness, his outlaw spirit, his differentness from Fort Wayne, Ind.,\u201d and that\u2019s true, but that\u2019s only part of it. While so much of New York makes her both invisible and painfully out of place \u2013 crushed anonymously and uncomfortably in a crowded subway train \u2013 Bobby, charismatic and bright Bobby, cocksure where Helen is so uneasy, picks her out, sees her clearly. Marco leaves off-screen, but Bobby never wants to be away from her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite being a dealer, Bobby initially tells Helen he doesn\u2019t use. This lie falls away when Helen finds him shooting heroin while she was asleep, but is replaced by a new lie: that he\u2019s \u201cjust chipping,\u201d not an addict but a casual user. But heroin is the centre of Bobby\u2019s life: it\u2019s his social circle, his work, his joy. This means Helen remains at a kind of distance even as Bobby invites her in: she\u2019s perpetually the only sober one at the party. By the time she starts using, it doesn\u2019t come as a surprise to the audience, even if it does to Bobby. He holds her face, looking into her glazed-over eyes, and asks when this happened. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold<\/em>, Griffin Dunne\u2019s 2017 documentary about his aunt, Calvin Trillin says that the one-sentence pitch for The Panic in Needle Park<\/em> \u2013 which Didion co-wrote with her husband John Gregory Dunne \u2013 was \u201cit\u2019s Romeo and Juliet<\/em> but they\u2019re junkies.\u201d If that is how the film was pitched, it\u2019s not quite how it turned out. Romeo and Juliet were teenagers who fell in love at first sight but were kept apart by the world; Bobby and Helen are pulled together and apart and back together, like the fates can\u2019t quite make up their mind. Their on-again-off-again but always-and-forever dynamic \u2013 where no betrayal, no matter how devastating, no wound no matter how open, trumps the magnetic pull between them \u2013 reminds me of Louise Bryant and Jack Reed in Reds<\/em> (1981), Validimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot<\/em> (or, if you prefer, Laurel and Hardy), and more than anything, Joe and Ratso in Midnight Cowboy<\/em> (1969). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cinematographer Adam Holender shot both Midnight Cowboy <\/em>and The Panic in Needle Park<\/em>, and he brings a similar visual sensibility, particularly to how each film looks at New York. There was a lot of talk at the time of Panic<\/em> being graphic and extreme \u2013 it was even banned in the UK until 1974 \u2013 but at fifty years\u2019 distance, what sticks out is its attention to detail and process. It\u2019s not just that it has characters shoot heroin on-screen, it\u2019s the succession of close-ups on the heroin being prepared for their arm and their arm being prepared for the heroin. It\u2019s the cinema verit\u00e9 <\/em>style and lack of music that makes it feel so grounded and real. Like Midnight Cowboy<\/em>, it feels like a glimpse to the edge of the world, into a society that operates on the fringe of society, touching it but never becoming part of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gene Siskel called Panic<\/em> \u201clittle more than a traditional love story set in New York’s West Side drug culture,\u201d but it’s precisely that juxtaposition that makes it so compelling. Helen and Bobby\u2019s overlapping but misaligned addictions \u2013 when she wants to go to the country, he\u2019s high, when he wants to get clean and out of the city, she\u2019s shooting eighty dollars a day \u2013\u00a0 are the thing that keeps them together and the thing that splits them apart.\u00a0\"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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