Richie Andrusco is the seven year old who - believing he has shot his brother Richard Brewster - wanders off on his own to Coney Island,
I wondered if the camera was hidden, or they just get away with a lot because it's always pointing down, at small boy height. Engel is credited as cameraman, it was carried at waist height and you looked down into the viewfinder; Orkin edited with Lester Troob. Eddy Manson's score uses the harmonica imaginatively. It was apparently shot silent.
Allegedly an influence of the French New Wave. However it's not referred to in my de Baecque and Toubiana Truffaut biography, not the director's own 'Films of My Life' nor in the pages of the collected Cahiers du Cinéma Vol.1. But I find this quotation on TCM, authored by Sean Axmaker in 2009, ""Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn't been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie, Little Fugitive" - Francois Truffaut - though no source is given. I'll have to investigate.
It's very good. Won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was Oscar nominated. I'd never heard of it before.
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