Little Fugitive: the Only Living Boy in New York
‘Little Fugitive’ is a vérité style independent feature feature film shot in New York and Coney Island in the early fifties. I wasn’t aware of it until recently, but I probably should have been. It won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was a key influence on the French New Wave and surely too on the Dardenne brothers. “Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young Morris Engel…with his fine ‘Little Fugitive.’” <Francois Truffaut>
The premise caught my attention: a seven year-old boy is tricked into believing he has killed his elder brother and flees to Coney Island with the money his mother left for groceries. This could be the back story for one of my ‘tales of wonder and despair,’ I thought. And, in fact, I have a note somewhere about the boy as a fugitive from a crime he didn’t commit. It’s a situation that provokes an intriguing mix of adventure and guilt, while also offering a clear resolution.
But the set-up proves the least effective part of the film. It feels staged, the child actors self-conscious, performing to camera. I was bracing myself for disappointment, but once we reach Coney Island, the film burst into life, spontaneous and incidental. We watch the boy roam the amusement park and beach in a series of short scenes and passing encounters captured by a concealed camera strapped to the the director/cameraman’s body.
Although the story does not seem to progress through this action, this is where the film is most compelling because, released from parental oversight, the boy starts to express himself. Inadvertently. Innocently. By doing whatever he feels like. We already know he dreams of being a cowboy. He carries a toy gun in a holster and longs to ride horses on the range. When he arrives at the amusement park he makes straight for the carousel. He treats his mount like a real horse, stroking its mane, tapping its rump with the end of the rein. We see him go round and round, each time reaching out to catch a ring—a feature I’d never heard of, and which seems derived from the rodeo, requiring riders to lean from the horse and grab a small ring from a staging post.
The boy fails this challenge, but seeks to prove himself elsewhere, aspiring to the baseball skills of his elder brother and friends. He visits the tin can alley, repeatedly, and later struggles manfully to lift the bat against an automated pitching machine. He eats, randomly and with relish, hot dogs and watermelon and coke and ice-cream, though he rolls his candy floss into a ball to practice his aim. In between, he is left to wander among the crowd, bored and lonely.
It is only when he has exhausted his cash that he discovers the attraction he most covets: a pony ride. Fortunately, among the crowds on the beach, he meets a boy collecting bottle returns and he soon dedicates himself to raising funds for ride after ride after ride, so many rides the owner begins to wonder about the boy’s parents. When he raises the subject, the boy runs away.
The narrative picks up again, a gentle tale of a boy obtaining the solicitude of his elder brother, but these revelatory scenes of a boy following his inclinations remain the heart of the film. Innocent, direct, unencumbered by attitude.
And the vérité footage of 1950s Coney Island is sensational.
