Joey Norton goes on the adventure of a lifetime in Coney Island in underground indie classic LITTLE FUGITIVE
LITTLE FUGITIVE (Morris Engel, Ray Ashley, and Ruth Orkin, 1953)
Coney Island
1001 Boardwalk West
Rained out: Monday, July 1, free, dusk
Rescheduled: Tuesday, August 27, free, dusk
www.coneyislandfunguide.com
A summer night in Coney Island is the perfect time and place to see one of the most influential and important — and vastly entertaining — works to ever come out of the city, Morris Engel’s charming Little Fugitive. In celebration of the film’s sixtieth anniversary, the free summer series “Flicks on the Beach” is screening the newly restored 35mm print of the underground classic, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1953, was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar, and was entered into the National Film Registry in 1997. Written and directed with Ray Ashley and Ruth Orkin, Engel’s future wife, Little Fugitive follows the gritty, adorable exploits of seven-year-old wannabe cowboy Joey Norton (Richie Andrusco, in his only film role), who runs away to Coney Island after his older brother, Lennie (Richard Brewster), and his brother’s friends, Harry (Charlie Moss) and Charley (Tommy DeCanio), play a trick on the young boy, using ketchup to convince Joey that he accidentally killed Lennie. With their single mother (Winifred Cushing) off visiting their ailing mother, Joey heads out on his own, determined to escape the cops who are surely after him. But once he gets to Coney Island, he decides to take advantage of all the crazy things to be found on the beach, along the boardwalk, and in the surrounding area, including, if he can get the money, riding a real pony.
A no-budget black-and-white neo-Realist masterpiece shot by Engel with a specially designed lightweight camera that was often hidden so people didn’t know they were being filmed, Little Fugitive explores the many pleasures and pains of childhood and the innate value of home and family. As Joey wanders around Coney Island, he meets all levels of humanity, preparing him for the world that awaits as he grows older. Meanwhile, Engel gets into the nooks and crannies of the popular beach area, from gorgeous sunrises to beguiling shadows under the boardwalk. In creating their beautifully told tale, Engel, Ashley, and Orkin use both trained and nonprofessional actors, including Jay Williams as Jay, the sensitive pony ride man, and Will Lee, who went on to play Mr. Hooper on Sesame Street, as an understanding photographer, while Eddie Manson’s score continually references “Home on the Range.” Rough around the edges in all the right ways, Little Fugitive became a major influence on the French New Wave, with Truffaut himself singing its well-deserved praises. There’s really nothing quite like it, before or since.
An underrated gem, The Manxman is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best early works from his British silent period. Based on an 1896 novel by Hall Caine, the 1929 melodrama, Hitchcock’s last fully silent film, tells the story of a romantic love triangle between two best friends, fisherman Pete Quilliam (Carl Brisson), lawyer Philip Christian (Malcolm Keen), and the woman they both love, Kate Cregeen (Anny Ondra). When Kate’s father, Caesar (Randle Ayrton), rejects Pete’s bid for his daughter’s hand, calling him a “penniless lout,” the fisherman takes to the sea, vowing to return from Africa a wealthy man worthy of marrying her. But while Pete is away, Philip and Kate grow much closer and contemplate whether they should break Kate’s promise to wait for Pete. When they learn of Pete’s death, they are ready to celebrate their love, but when the report turns out to be a mistake and Pete comes back a successful man, the drama heats up amid lies, betrayal, and public humiliation. Set on the Isle of Man but actually filmed on the Cornwall coast, The Manxman is a gripping tale that rises above pure soap opera through Hitchcock and cinematographer Jack E. Cox’s (Blackmail, The Lady Vanishes) intricate compositions and the German Expressionist acting style employed by Keen (The Lodger), who seems to have walked out of a von Sternberg film. One of the most memorable shots occurs with the three protagonists standing as if alone in Kate and Pete’s home, Kate leaning by a window, Philip bowed by the front door, and Pete in the front, head raised, confused and worried about the future. Hitchcock employs his mastery of suspense in several critical scenes, which he lets go on at length without any intertitles, forcing the viewer to wonder what is being said and then surprising them with what actually happens. Hitchcock sold The Manxman short when he told François Truffaut, “It was a very banal picture. . . . It was not a Hitchcock movie.” A DCP restoration of The Manxman, including a long-missing scene, is screening June 30 at 3:00 in the BAM Harvey Theater as part of “The Hitchcock 9,” with live music by pianist Stephen Horne and harpist Diana Rowan. The series continues through July 3 with such other rarely shown, carefully restored Hitchcock silents as The Farmer’s Wife, The Pleasure Garden, Downhill, and Champagne.
For seven successive Tuesday nights, a serial killer who calls himself the Avenger has murdered a golden-haired woman. When a lodger (Ivor Novello) comes to rent a room from Mr. and Mrs. Bunting (Arthur Chesney and Marie Ault), the landlady soon suspects that the curious character might just be the murderer, especially when he shows an interest in their daughter, a golden-haired fashion model named Daisy (the one-named June), which angers Daisy’s beau, Joe (Malcolm Keen), a cop just assigned to the case. Based on a novel and play by Marie Belloc Lowndes, The Lodger is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s first films; he uses very few title cards in the silent work, allowing the story to tell itself. He serves up a heavy dose of red herrings in the Jack the Ripper-like tale, which drags on for quite a bit before shifting gears in the later scenes. The mediocre picture is most notable for the groundwork it lays for Hitchcock’s future films, investigating such themes as sexual obsession and innocent men on the run while displaying the director’s never-ending — and rather frightening — cinematic relationship with blondes. A DCP restoration of The Lodger is being screened June 30 at 7:30 in the BAM Harvey Theater as part of “The Hitchcock 9,” with live music by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. The series continues through July 3 with such other rarely shown Hitchcock silents as The Manxman, The Pleasure Garden, Downhill, and Champagne.
Winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes, Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways is an epic Canadian romance about the sexual and emotional bond between two people in the midst of complex change. Montréal teacher Laurence Alia (Melvil Poupaud) and actress Frédérique Belair (Suzanne Clément) are madly in love, sharing a unique worldview — one of the things they do is regularly list things that minimize their pleasure. But when Laurence suddenly tells Fred that he was born in the wrong body and wants to live life as a woman, their relationship is profoundly challenged. At first, Fred tries to accept Laurence as a woman, helping him choose clothes and defending him in public, but soon it gets to be too much for her as she considers what lies ahead. Meanwhile, Laurence loses his job — although the students are fine with his change, the parents aren’t — and so decides to focus on his writing career. Over the course of twelve tumultuous years, Laurence and Fred pursue life both together and apart, with drama following them everywhere they go. Former child actor Dolan, who turned twenty-four this past March, wrote, directed, and edited Laurence Anyways, already his third feature film, following 2009’s I Killed My Mother and 2010’s Heartbeats. At 168 minutes, it is at least a half hour too long, but it regularly takes intriguing, unexpected twists and turns that makes it worth sticking with, even as Dolan tries to squeeze in too much. Clément, who was named Best Actress at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar, gives a dynamic performance as Fred; her hairstyles alone, as the story moves between 1987 and 1999, are worth the price of admission, especially when seen in Dolan’s stunning compositions, which center on lush reds and whites. Poupaud (A Christmas Tale, Genealogies of a Crime) is beautifully restrained as Laurence as he deals with Fred and her family, his colleagues at work, and his mother (Nathalie Baye), who shockingly admits that she never bonded with him when he was a child. Dolan, who also did the costumes, includes several visually dazzling scenes reminiscent of MTV video interludes, as water crashes down and clothing flies through the air in slow motion; the soundtrack features songs by Fever Ray, Kim Carnes, the Cure, Duran Duran, and Depeche Mode as well as Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and Vivaldi. Although it takes some dedication on the part of the viewer, Laurence Anyways is a startlingly different kind of romance, from an emerging young filmmaker with a bright future.
