NFR Project: “Little Fugitive”
Dir: Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin
Scr: Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin
Pho: Morris Engel
Ed: Ruth Orkin, Lester Troob
Premiere: Oct. 6, 1953
80 min.
This film is revolutionary. It flies in the face of feature-film values
as codified and exercised by the major film studios of the time. It is a hand-crafted,
naturalistic little masterpiece.
Morris Engel was the prime mover of this project, an experienced
photojournalist who wanted to make a film in a new way. Redesigning a hand-held
movie camera created to be used in combat conditions, Engel wound up with an
unobtrusive recording device that was shoulder-mounted, held at the waist, with
a viewfinder that one looked down into. This allowed footage to be captured on
the sly, without anyone noticing. This means that, in a film filled with
milling crowds, every action and reaction of the bystanders was spontaneous and
unrehearsed. (He shot in black-and-white, and silent; all the dialogue and
sound effects was dubbed in post-production.)
Engel, Ashley, and Orkin came up with a simple story to tell. In Brooklyn,
seven-year-old Joey lives with his 12-year-old brother Lennie and his widowed
mother in a cramped lower-income apartment. The mother has to go and care for
her own sick mother, so she leaves Lennie in charge of Joey for a day. Lennie
resents this, and decides to play a prank on Joey. He and his friends convince
Joey that he has shot and killed his brother; they tell him to go and hide
himself.
Joey takes this very seriously. He goes home and grabs the six dollars
his mother had left out for groceries and, avoiding all the policemen he sees, gets on the subway. It takes him to the
boardwalk and amusements of Coney Island. There he actually thrives, happily riding
rides and eating junk food. Joey is obsessed with horses, and when he finds a
pony ride, he yearns to go on it – but he has spent all his money. He learns
from another kid the trick of picking up and returning empty glass soda bottles
on the beach for money. This he does, and rides over and
over, until the pony-ride man asks him who he’s there with.
Joey gets scared and runs away, and ends up sleeping out in the open
under the boardwalk. His brother, meanwhile, is frantic. He repents tricking
his brother and searches for him fruitlessly.
The next morning, Joey wakes and returns to the pony ride. Finally, the
pony-ride man tricks Joey into giving him his name and address. He looks up
Joey’s phone number and calls his home. Lennie answers, and begs the man to
hang on to Joey until he gets there. However, Joey sees the man talk to a
policeman, and he takes off again. Now Lennie searches among the crowds at the
beach. He spots Joey but then loses him. It’s only when it starts to rain that
Lennie finds Joey all by himself, still picking up empty bottles. He tenderly
brings him home again.
They get to the house and arrange themselves in front of the TV. Their
mother returns minutes later. She thinks they have spent the entire day indoors
and promises them that, on the weekend, she will take them to Coney Island as a
treat. The brothers look at each other ruefully.
All of the actors Engel and company used were amateurs. There is
definitely a script, but the filming is so low-key and natural that the drama appears
to be improvised. Engel was a masterful photographer, and the visuals in the
film – the gritty streets of Brooklyn, the fanciful confines of Coney Island,
the play of the waves on the shore, are all rendered exquisitely. The images
are sharp and gorgeous.
The filmmakers easily take us into the mind of the child at the center
of the film. He is wracked by guilt, afraid of the cops, but then is easily
distracted by pleasures the amusement park affords. In making a movie about
ordinary life, the filmmakers seem to have taken a page from the Italian neorealists,
who filmed stories about the lower classes and the poor on location with
amateur actors. In turn, this film is said to have influenced the directors of
French New Wave cinema.
At any rate, the key here is that, with no money, few resources, and a
cast and crew of volunteers, Engel, Ashley, and Orkin created a compelling and
coherent fiction film – one that can stand up against anything put out by
Hollywood. American filmmaking of the time was studio-centered. The idea that
you could use film to create your own unique, home-grown stories would lay
dormant in the U.S. until the advent of the independent productions, so-called “personal”
films, helmed by director/writer/actor John Cassavetes in the late 1950s.
Another of the filmmakers’ great achievements is capturing the look and
feel of a certain place and a certain time. It’s New York City on a summer’s
day in the early 1950s. The clothes, the manners, the surroundings are all
preserved forever. It’s a specificity that generates universal understanding, a
sympathy for the kids and the helpful adults who come together to tell this
charming little tale.
The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to
review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological
order. Next time: The
Living Desert.
