1953 masterpiece
Rating: 18/20 (Buster: no rating)
Plot: A little kid, convinced by his brother and brother's friends that he's shot his brother to death, runs away to Coney Island. He's ruthless! He's rough! He's the titular little fugitive!
Note: I gave this movie a bonus point for the appearance of Will Lee who played Mr. Hooper on Sesame Street. That's worth something, right?
Dopey poster there, but don't let that dissuade you from checking this movie out. It's all about the visuals as this could almost be, and maybe would have benefited from being, a silent movie. A trio of photographers--Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin--made it with, I'm guessing, a budget of whatever the food and rides at Coney Island the kid enjoys cost them. Engel did a bit, but those other two didn't do anything at all unless you count writing Son of Flubber as something. But you can tell it's created with photographers' eyes. There are extended, entirely wordless montages backed with a score that is nothing more than a person playing a harmonica, and those work best as the directors have that rare ability to make the mundane--an abandoned plastic shovel, rain on the boardwalk, carousel horses' contorted faces, scattered waste paper baskets on a street--seem like they're the most important things you will ever see in your life. White chickens and red wheelbarrows, you know. I really liked the almost purgatorial imagery when Joey first gets to Coney Island with monkey marionettes, animatronic clowns, too-fast spinning carousels, growling barkers, and those horses' faces that I mentioned. That carousel is the first adventure Joey tackles while enjoying his life as a fugitive. There were so many angles and shots in that scene that it makes you wonder how many times the kid had to ride the damned thing. Precariously, too, as he reaches futilely for that ring. Let's go ahead and call that a stunt. Joey's fleeing from his home is brilliantly filmed, too. I love how the camera angles work there as he almost runs into cops, low angles to help us feel it through the little guy's eyes. Another scene I loved was the one with Mr. Hooper where the kid is having one of those head-in-a-hole photographs. This one makes him a cowboy with a pair of six shooters, but he's a cowboy suffering from microcephaly. It's one of those scenes or images--and there are a lot of them here--that says so much without having to say anything at all. The movie's got this odd feel, but it's definitely not the bad kind of odd. It's a refreshing sort of oddness with that weird harmonica score ("Home on the Range"? Really?), dubbed dialogue, the montage and stretches of story that do nothing to actually advance the story. The acting from the children is really strong. Richie Andrusco plays Joey, and it's his only film role so he's Peter Ostrum before Peter Ostrum. Richard Brewster plays the brother, and this was his only acting role, too. Really, almost everybody but Mr. Hooper didn't do anything after this movie. The kids might overdo it a little at times, especially in the scene where they stage the brother's murder. "Lenny's shot! Lenny's shot! You shot him, Joey. You shot your brotha!" But the bad acting actually fits there because they were supposed to be kids acting. This is a terrific little movie that deserves more attention. It influenced the French New Wave and Truffaut. But it also reminded me--mostly because it's a kid running around by himself in a place where a kid shouldn't be by himself but also because of how unaware Andrusco seems to be that he's in a movie--of Crazy and Thief, that movie that I wrote about a couple weeks ago and really wanted you to watch. I think this might mean that I'm a sucker for movies where children are walking around by themselves. (See also: My Neighbor Totoro). This movie's got a touching ending, by the way. Well, the ending before the ending. There's a punchline to this whole thing that might be the one thing I'd change about the whole movie. The ending before that, however, is very nice.
Buster, by the way, was intrigued by this one. She told me at one point, "I'm never going to shoot people." We'll see about that, I guess.
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