Little Fugitive

One of the most interesting things about Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashley’s production of Little Fugitive, currently being revived at Film Forum, is that it came four years after Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (l948). Engel actually shot the movie in a cinema verite style with a hand held 35mm camera, not a common piece of photographic equipment at that or in any time in the history of American film. If Bicycle Thieves is an iconic piece of Italian neorealism then Little Fugitive might be sui generis example of American hyperrealism. The scene where Lenny (Richard Brewster) tries to locate his kid brother Joey (Richie Andrusco) on a crowded Coney Island beach is uncannily reminiscent of the doomed attempt to retrieve the stolen bicycle, the needle in a haystack, amongst the mountains of bicycles that fill the streets of De Sica’s post-war Rome. What makes Little Fugitive singular in American cinematic history is that it’s about objects rather than a story. Americans genuinely like their bread and butter, which is to say plot, but while Little Fugitive literally had plenty of bread and butter—in the form of cotton candy, watermelon, hot dogs and soda pop—it didn’t provide the kind of bread and butter most filmgoers generally seek. The story is rather simple, young Joey runs away when he is tricked into believing he’s murdered his older brother. Joey has his seven year old version of a Walgurgisnacht and Last Supper in one, riding on the El to Coney Island, passing signs reading “Smile It’s Worth a Million Dollars and Only Costs a Dime” and hearing shills in front of an arcade crying out “everyone knocks them down, you will too,” seeing the ferris wheel and the steeple chase and caressing the head of a merry-go- round horse. The brilliance of the film is to see guilt from the point of view of a seven-year-old and from that character’s height too. Joey survives by collecting the deposits on bottles he finds next to impervious lovers under a boardwalk or nestled into a jetty. “Why did you run away?” Lenny asks his younger brother at the end. “It was just a joke.” “Why didn’t you tell me,” Joey says and that’s a wrap. In the meanwhile Little Fugitive, awash in the imagery of the great photographer Ruth Orkin, creates its own iconography. The motto is, don’t ever underestimate the intelligence of the movie going public. Just because Hollywood plays to the lowest common denominator doesn’t mean that audiences aren’t capable of a helluva lot more (Little Fugitive opened in 5000 theaters in l953) and still can draw substantial audiences today. Little Fugitive is a great American movie that proves the point.

Las Vegas Journal: The Bicycle Thief

Vittoria De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief is a truly great classic of post-war Italian neorealism. It’s a little like Gogol’s The Overcoat—a story of the loss of a seemingly mundane item that has great significance to an impoverished worker, who invests the object with almost magical significance. De Sica’s protagonist voyages in despair through Rome with his son, vainly trying to recover a lost bicycle. In a latter-day version of De Sica’s tale, a guest recently checked into the Las Vegas MGM Grand, only to arrive at his room bereft of a valued duffle bag. Anyone who has ever visited the MGM Grand will realize that any comparison with post-war Rome is nil. Bombed-out buildings and ancient ruins are replaced by an air of gaudy opulence and faux antiquity. Still, a lost bag is a lost bag, and when you have been deprived of something, you desire it even more, even if the contents—a couple of shirts, some underwear and socks—are relatively modest. But lo, myths are constantly being made. Every River Acheron provides its Charon, every Inferno its Virgil. In this case the MGM sent a messenger named Deepak from hospitality, who exuded a Buddha-like compassion, leading the traveler from the gruff, unhelpful lost-and-found attendant, who acted and looked like a dangerous barking dog, to the inner sanctum of hotel security, manned by one Officer Dobbs. Dobbs, a genial fellow with an earplug, knew his way around the maelstrom. The check-in time of the traveler was ascertained, recordings made by hotel video cameras were studied, and it was determined that the bag had never come into the MGM in the first place. Rather, it had been left in a cab whose number was easily identified. By three o’clock the next morning the bag was returned.

On the Bowery

Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery (1956) looks backwards to the great Russian dalliances with reality, like Dziga Vertov’s Man With the Movie Camera (1929), the documentary still-life work of Walker Evans (Rogosin knew James Agee, who worked with Walker Evans on the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men from 1941), and the work of neorealists like De Sica, who used real people to create classics like The Bicycle Thief (1948).  The current revival of On the Bowery at Film Forum is a reminder of how important its gritty realism, as in Hal Ashley’s Little Fugitive(1953), became for the development of the cinéma vérité movement and the French New Wave. Would we have Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966), which used non-professional actors in documentary settings, without the precedent set by these two films? The New York of On the Bowery and Little Fugitive, with poverty lurking under elevated tracks, is similar, though the story of On the Bowery is really a subterfuge. Little Fugitive is a powerful narrative about a child who runs away to Coney Island, the victim of a prank in which he is made to think he has murdered his brother. On the Bowery is simpler. It’s the saloon that O’Neill painted so beautifully in Iceman, replete with pipe dreams, though minus a Hickey. The central character arrives on the Bowery and tries to stop drinking, but can’t. Ray Salyer plays the attractive young railroad worker with a drinking problem—Rogosin conscripted him for the film and he actually received some Hollywood offers after the movie was released. But, in keeping with On the Bowery’s theme of dispossession, Salyer simply disappeared and was never heard from again. Meanwhile, one of the commentators in a short film made by the filmmaker’s son, Michael, about the creation of On the Bowery, compares the portraiture, and especially a famed orgy sequence in which the camera creates a mural of inebriated faces, to Rembrandt. Cassevetes and a generation of French and American filmmakers who sought truth rather than escape in cinema draw the most obvious comparisons when it comes to this kind of cinematography, but the Rembrandt analogy is a show-stopper.

NB: Rogosin’s ownership of the Bleecker Street cinema, which showed many of the works that influenced him and went on to show films that were influenced by his work, his self-confessed drinking problem and his well-to-to background as the son of a prominent textile manufacturer are all salient bits of back story for viewers of OTB.

I am Love

Luca Guadagnino’s I am Love is an essay on superficiality posing as profundity. The film begins in snow and ends with rain falling on statues. Using these images, Guadagnino introduces the classic elements of the pathetic fallacy, with nature mirroring the emotions of delusion and sorrow. Add to this the stylized title sequences draped in Art Deco fonts. Name your scandalous heroine Emma and cast the role with an actress who has made a reputation in high-art cinema, like the film based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Have her fall in love with a chef. Is it her love of his shrimp that is the turning point of the drama, or is it her lust for him that makes her eventually fall in love with the shrimp? Establish the aristocratic, novelistic Italian drama, which is immediately suggestive of truly great works of cinema like Visconti’s The Leopard, and then add lush lyric sequences (including, naturally, the friezes of auspicious edifices) that conjure the sweep of history in movies like De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Bertolucci’s The Conformist. Portray doting servants of the kind that appeared in the self-same Italian epics. Create leitmotifs like a cropped hairstyle shared by an adulterous mother and lesbian daughter to establish a relationship predicated on rebellion. And then, as the coup de grace, create the ultimate piece of melodrama in an adventitious and tragic accident that reveals the falsity of a world. In The Leopard, as a case in point, Visconti created a tragic figure defined by the complexity of the historical context in which he found himself—an aristocrat at the time of Garibaldi, facing the economic exigencies of an aggressive new mercantile order. Based on the novel by Lampedusa, The Leopard was a profound meditation on the passing of a way of life. Ironically, there are Tancredis in both movies, but the similarity is in name only.