Critics reviews

At its core, this pioneering independent film is just an urban heart-warmer, but it has a fresh, gritty surface and a Grade A horror-comic hook... Morris Engel, the cinematographer, who shares the writing and directing credits with Ruth Orkin (his wife) and Ray Ashley, used a handheld camera to exploit all the wonders of Coney Island; the result is a lively essay on ball-toss games, pop bottles, pony rides, and human midsections of all varieties, as seen from a four-footer's perspective.

As much as for its sensitive handling of moments such as this, Little Fugitive is an enormously endearing movie because it does what Rockwell could not or would not do—it shows, without emphasis or affect, an everyday American scene in which people of all races and creeds are casually mixing, here in the relaxed social sphere of Coney.

Little Fugitive remains one of the most elementally joyous and vital films about youth ever made distinctly because the film fully adopts Joey's point of view, averting any sense of preachy, didactic moralizing by regulating all adults to bit parts.

Though not much happens in the film, both its neorealist roots and its source as a major influence on the soon-to-be New Wave directors abound in every scene.

Obvious pleasures derive from the film's time-capsule documentation of Brooklyn regionalisms ("fellas," "wuz," and other patois feature heavily in the dialogue) and cultural institutions (Coney's peak-era chaos has never been more lovingly detailed). Yet as with so many a cinematic treasure, Little Fugitive reveals its greater glory through universal resonances.

There's influential, and then there's this 1953 microbudgeted beauty, one that's made its way into the DNA of everything from cinema vérité to the French New Wave. But that's history—the truth is that for all of its dated Noo Yawkese elocutions and quaint urbanity (stickball! straphangers!), the film still feels startlingly alive.

The film's beguiling visual poetry and smatterings of sociological subtext function less than coherently as transitional markers between cinematic epochs, or even as the nascent burblings of any imminent DIY revolution; instead, they're redolent of a modernist apotheosis.