7.5 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
When a seven-year-old boy is tricked into believing he killed his older brother, he gathers his meager possessions and flees to New York's nether wonderland: Coney Island. Upon and beneath the crowded boardwalk, Joey experiences a day and a night filled with adventures and mysteries, resulting in a film that's spontaneous and delightful.
Starring: Richard Brewster, Winifred Cushing, Jay Williams (I), Will Lee (IV), Charlie MossComing of age | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Family | Insignificant |
Adventure | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.32:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: LPCM Mono
None
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Little Fugitive is pure cinema, pure childhood, and arguably the first truly successful American independent film. Co-directed by photojournalist
Morris Engel—who shot it—his girlfriend, Ruth Orkin—who edited it—and writer Ray Ashley, the 1953 production was made for only $30,000, filmed on
the fly in Brooklyn using a discrete handheld 35mm camera. Like the 1930 German film People on a Sunday, and certainly inspired by the
recent Italian neo-realists, Little Fugitive has an almost proto-vérité quality, using non-professional actors in a live, real-world setting—in this
case, the festive summertime stretch of Coney Island, with its throngs of beach-goers, 10¢ amusements, and rickety carnival rides.
Documentarians
D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles were admirers—soon adopting lightweight cameras for their own work—and the film got a permanent blurb when
none other than Nouvelle Vague pioneer François Truffaut wrote, "Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn't been for the young
American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie Little Fugitive." After taking the Silver Lion prize
at the Venice Film Festival, the little docu-drama-that-could played in almost 5,000 U.S. theaters—an unheard-of number for contemporary indie
filmmakers—and was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story.
The Coney Island Kid
Mastered from a 35mm print preserved by the Museum of Modern Art—with assistance from The Film Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation—Little Fugitive's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer looks wonderful, providing you don't expect an absolutely pristine image. Like a lot of Kino-Lorber titles, the film is essentially presented "as-is," so you will notice some age-related damage, including black and white specks, occasional hairs stuck at the edge of the frame, and brief vertical scratches. None of this is particularly distracting, but you can imagine how breathtaking the film would look if it had been given the sort of frame-by-frame restoration usually seen on Criterion or big studio releases. Otherwise, Little Fugitive is a real pleasure to watch here. On the flip-side of Kino's hands-off approach, no obvious edge enhancement or grain-erasing DNR has been applied, so the image looks natural and clearly filmic, preserving Morris Engel's striking photojournalistic cinematography. Clarity-wise, the picture looks to be as resolved as is possible given the source materials, and the black and white contrast balance is excellent, with deep blacks and highlights that are crisp but never overblown.
Like the picture quality, the uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 mono track Kino offers us here has its age/budget-related quirks—some light crackling, a low- level tape hiss—but the mix is never abrasive, and always listenable. Although Little Fugitive was shot silently—Engel wouldn't develop the tech to shoot portable sync-sound until his 1960 feature Weddings and Babies—the after-the-fact dubbing of the effects, ambience, and voices is actually quite good, with only a few moments of he's clearly not saying that there disjointedness. Everything sounds realistic—the carnival clamor, the pouring rain, even footsteps—and the aw-shucks Brooklyn dialogue is always easy to understand. (Which is good, because Kino has once again neglected to include any subtitle options.) The film's aural highlight, though, is the lonesome harmonica score that accompanies little Joey's big journey.
A rare glimpse at the Coney Island of yore, a slice-of-life look at 1950s childhood, a mythic journey by a junior Odysseus—Little Fugitive is all of the above. Though lauded by Scorsese, Cassavetes, and Truffaut, this under-seen and under-appreciated piece of early independent American cinema deserves a wider audience, and hopefully Kino-Lorber's fantastic new Blu-ray release will help it find just that. Think of it as an arthouse family film; kids too young to have been spoiled by high-energy television may enjoy its straightforward adventure, while adults of all ages will be overwhelmed by a tide of nostalgia for simpler times. Highly recommended!
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