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whom I don't remember having seen before—are Bryan Forbes and Theodore Bikel (Dutch officer). Eugene Deckers (daring young Frenchman) and Arthur Butcher (Polish colonel).
There isn't a woman in sight!
LITTLE FUGITIVE Certificate U: London Pavilion Directors: Ray Ashley, Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin
AND the triple directorate also wrote the story.
It concerns a seven-year-old New York boy, dressed in the usual Sloppy Joe uniform of all those New York boys who play on the city's vacant lots.
He tags on to his elder brother Ricky and his pals, who really find the small boy a bit of a nuisance. One day they play a rather drastic trick on him. Because he insists on handling a rifle they have found they pretend it has had a real bullet in it. He points it at big brother, who falls. his shirt horribls stained with tomato ketchup (for blood. you understand).
"Now see what you've done Make yourself scarce." they say— and he runs off to Coney Island where, shelving his horrible deed for the time being, he "does" the pleasure ground thoroughly.
The film, while having all the appearance of being made on a shoestring—sometimes its photo. graphy is almost amateurish, with the screen full of blemishes—is a refreshing and penetrating study of childhood let loose in a crazy world of artificial fun.
The camera follows the beguiling Richie Andrusco—the boy who plays the part—from booth to booth, among prostrate bodies on the beach, weaving among bare legs while he salvages empty soft drink bottles to sell, working out when he has enough to pay for this and then for that—a city child full of resource and self possession—and with the knowledge all the time that he has done something rather frightful and that at all costs the police are to be avoided.
Of course, back at home (the mother has gone to visit her sick mother and left the boy in the care of the elder boy). there is anxiety on the part of the brother whose "corpse" has risen and now wonders where small brother has got to.
The film has one moment of loveliness the early morning on the beach with the human litter all gone and only the clean sea washing in languid ripples over the clean sand.
Altogether a happy. unpretentious film which I think will be remembered longer than many a super effort.