Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin: Poets of Everyday Life (Bright Lights Film Journal).
It’s not hard to see why Little Fugitive, Engel and Orkin’s most famous and successful film, was so inspiring not only to the French but also to American auteurs like Cassavettes and Scorsese. Like the two features that would follow it, Little Fugitive is a paean to the sights, smells, and sounds of New York, from the cramped but somehow comforting streets of Brooklyn to the dazzling chaos of Coney Island as seen through a child’s eyes. Engel and Orkin extrapolate the universal from the personal in this Homeric story of a little boy’s heroic trek alone through the vastness of an urban amusement park.
