Movie Review: The Little Fugitive (1953)

I might have easily stumbled across this movie while flipping channels late at night, in which case I wouldn’t have lasted through the first five minutes. And that would have been a shame.

At the beginning, Joey, who is about six, watches his older brother and his brother’s friends play games he’s left out of. The level of treacly gee-whizishnes is hard to take, and we’re acutely conscious of being inside a completely constructed world.

The older kids are annoyed that Joey’s brother Kennie can’t join an upcoming trip to Coney Island because he has to look after Joey. In order to get Joey to go away, they convince him that he has accidentally shot Kennie in the chest. Joey flees to Coney Island, where most of the story takes place. Suddenly, the tone changes. Gone is the treacly dialog and the sense of ponderous predictability. Joey and Kennie’s mother, out on an urgent errand for the day, left them some money, and Joey takes it all to Coney Island with him. The second act is almost completely devoid of dialog other than background chatter. We simply watch Joey gradually spend his money on carnival attractions as we try to read his mind. How guilty does he feel? Has he completely blocked out what happened? What does he think is going to happen when he runs out of money? What will happen when he runs out of money? Or even just when it gets dark and the carnival closes?

For me, the departure from the Leave-It-To-Beaver-From-Hell environs of the beginnings was a huge relief; suddenly the story became real, ominous, and timeless. But I wonder (feel free to chime in) if that’s how most audiences of 1953 reacted. Perhaps the beginning needed to be so typical and obvious in order to get viewers to let down their guard and settle in for something they weren’t used to.

All this in itself would be enough to make an interesting film, but what takes this story to another level is the fact that Joey doesn’t just fantasize and wander around in a guilty haze. He learns and grows, doing his best to take charge of his perceived destiny. Kennie and friends had mocked Joey’s inability to knock a stack of bottles down with a ball. Now that Joey is to be a man, this is a bar that simply must be passed. He finds a similar event at the carnival, fails at it, creates a makeshift version out of debris and practices until he’s ready. He learns how to make money collecting bottles on the beach. He learns how to ride a pony without assistance. Our concern about what will happen when Joey’s desperate fantasy meets reality gradually morphs into a sort of begrudging acknowledgement that his behavior makes a kind of sense. I started to think, hopefully, that maybe it really would be possible for him to survive as an increasingly streetwise carnival urchin. Although he is of course eventually rescued, even that rescue owes more to Joey’s fixation on becoming a cowboy than to anything else.

Like all non-stupid stories about children, The Little Fugitive doesn’t imply that everything is going to be all right. We can relax in the knowledge that Joey, the child, is safe. But the world waiting for Joey the man to discover isn’t really all that different from the one he explored at the carnival that day. The real happy ending is the reassurance that this particular kid has a head start.