The aesthetic of The Little Fugitive is made plain thanks to chalk drawing credits playing over “Home on The Range.” We are about to enter a little boy’s world with all the joys and menial problems an adolescent life engenders. The key is giving these problems credence. Because in a young life, they feel ginormous.

Joey Norton always has his trusty pistol and holster and his big brother Lennie can always be found with his harmonica. They have your typical sibling dynamic. The little brother nagging, the big brother both put-upon and protective.

There’s an initial impression from the clunky dialogue causing the illusion of the film to falter. However, everything else around it feels real and sincere in a way we are unaccustomed to seeing in 1950s American films. Then you realize the whole picture had its dialogues done after the fact and it falls into place.

Coincidentally, it does give it a European sensibility with the dubbed dialogue. I can see how a film like this might have come to Cahiers du Cinema, Francois Truffaut in particular, and lit a fire under them. This is what movies could be, and not only something they could be, but also something attainable to others as long as they had a personal story to tell.

The 400 Blows but also Breathless and Le Beau Serge, developed narratives out of spaces the directors knew intimately. It wasn’t outside the purview of their experience, and it made a stunning entry point into their respective cinematic visions as they continually evolved over time. Still, one cannot discount their origins.

In the era of The Little Fugitive, a boy’s world was occupied by very specific things: baseball, guns, cowboys and Indians, television serials, comic books. The premise itself feels like an episode of Leave It to Beaver albeit outside of the watchful eye of middle-class suburbia.

Mother has to go away to pay a visit to a sick grandparent. Lennie has to watch over his little brother, and it’s going to derail his birthday outing to Coney Island with his friends. We have a simple dramatic situation and although he’s not a bad guy, he needs to use his boyish ingenuity to find a way out of his responsibilities. A dagger made out of ice is too impractical so they get the idea of using ketchup to fake a grisly death like they do in the movies.

The trick works wonders on getting rid of a pesky brother, and the film really comes into its own as they take it to the streets, and he’s out on the lam. It seems prudent to mention Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin, the trifecta behind the film’s conception.

Their greatest asset was a cutting-edge 35 mm camera both portable and unobtrusive making The Little Fugitive landmark for another reason. It really feels like one of the obvious birthplaces of independent cinema because we have this idea of film emerging from the studio lots out onto the streets. And these aren’t just exotic foreign locales but the humble spaces you and I frequent in our daily lives. Even these spaces can have their share of fascination for a willing audience.

It’s a cornucopia of leisure, a boy’s delight having a day on Coney Island. We get a steady stream of vignettes: photo cutouts, batting cages, hot dogs, watermelon, the beach, ball toss, and whirling carousel rides providing full immersion of a different era.

Not since Harold Lloyd can I recall such a great showcase for Coney Island. We’re even reminded recycling was a problem at the beach back in the 1950s too. Joey quickly learns he can make some loose change culling the seashore for glass bottles and simultaneously proving himself to be inquisitive and quite entrepreneurial.

I’m not sure how our little fugitive had so much money to begin with; the film doesn’t find need to explain itself, but then he figures out how he can get more and uses them on a very sound investment: pony rides. He’s positively infatuated with ponies, and it shows him returning time and time again just to get another chance to live out his dreams on the range.

Although the film is mostly kid-centric, it’s a pleasure to observe several of the adults who seem to be genuinely nurturing souls. Whether it’s the photographer (Will Lee) or Jay the ponyman (Jay Williams), they seem to encourage kids in their interests and imagination. It would be so easy for a film like this to feel severe and somehow oppressive, yet what comes off is the lightness and the joy of each of these very specific moments as experienced by a little boy.

If I’m honest, I’ve recognized a growing bias in my own film appreciation. I’m partial to films that use modest means, modest runtimes even, and still manage to transport us with stories and worlds we can relate to. I can think of no finer compliment for The Little Fugitive because it captures a moment plucked out of my parent’s generation, honed in on a very particular Brooklyn milieu, and through its images we are able to imbibe all these tactile sensations pulling us into the moment.

Although the boys at Cahiers can feel a bit arrogant and combative, even in how they dismissed much of the past and canonized the auteur-director as king, I do like the idea that they placed no undue importance on bigger, larger productions tossed out as awards bait. There’s something almost more satisfying happening in a movie like this because not so many folks will be joining the bandwagon — the fad of the cultural moment. That is the road lined with glitz, accolades, and transience.

Only with a bit of diligence and an open mind, do we get the opportunity to unearth it, and what a glorious joy it is. Unassuming gems like this make the moviegoing experience such a spectacular journey of human revelation. Because this little boy’s day speaks to so much and since I was a boy once, it resonates deeply. I won’t forget it until the next time I return to this story caught in time, where it will be waiting for me again even as I continue to change. This is the magic of the movies.

4.5/5 Stars