“Love For Movies Causes Boy, 10, To Lose A Week
SAN LEANARDO, Feb. 10 (U.P.)
Ten-year old Richard Allen was back home here today after a ‘lost week”—most of it spent inside San Francisco motion picture theaters.
His father found him emerging from a theater after he had been missing for seven days. During that time Richard set he had spent $20 on 16 movies, 15 comic books, six games, 150 candy bars and a large number of hot dogs.
‘I guess I just like movies,'”

That 1947 United Press newspaper clipping regularly makes the meme rounds online and for good reason: it’s charming as hell. Even without dwelling on the price of movie tickets and candy bars in 1940s San Francisco, there’s something lovably old-fashioned about Richard Allen’s childhood mischief that feels more like the kind of behavior you’d see in the comic strip section of the newspaper instead of amongst the actual news. Just a few years later, on the opposite US coast, independent filmmakers Morris Engel & Ruth Orkin staged their own version of Richard Allen’s “Lost Week” in 1953’s Little Fugitive, a low-stakes crime caper about a 7-year-old boy who spends two days as an unsupervised runaway at Coney Island. Like the newspaper clipping above, Little Fugitive plays like a Sunday-funnies comic strip rendered in live action. It’s like an “Oops! All Sluggos” edition of Nancy, or The Little Rascals acting out a daytime noir. Personally, I’d rather “lose a week” at a San Francisco movie theater than a Brooklyn amusement park, but it’s the same hot-dog flavor of vintage mischief all the same.

7-year-old Joey Norton (played by one-and-done actor Richie Andrusco) is too small to do anything fun. He gets easily flustered watching his big brother Lennie play with other, older Brooklynites because he can’t throw rocks or hit baseballs half as hard as them, and they’re equally frustrated with having to look after a younger kid who’s effectively still a toddler. In an attempt to scare Joey off so they can play big-boy games without him, the kids prank the little tyke into believing he has shot his brother dead with a rifle, using a bottle of ketchup to simulate a bloody wound. Freaked out that he’s soon to be arrested for “moider,” Joey hides out from the law at the funnest place in the world to become anonymous: Coney Island. While Lennie’s worried sick about where his little brother has run off to, Joey deliberately makes himself sick on cotton candy, Coca-Cola, and “a large number of hot dogs.” Once he gets to the park, the movie drops the need for plot and instead just watches him “lose” two days riding rides and playing games, only occasionally having to duck the attention of cops, who have no idea who he is.

Little Fugitive is most often lauded for its on-the-ground, run-and-gun filmmaking style, serving as a direct precursor to French New Wave gamechangers like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Engel’s innovation in that lineage was applying his war-journalist experience to narrative filmmaking, carrying a small, reconfigured movie camera around a real amusement park to document little Joey’s antics without drawing the attention of the hundreds of unpaid extras. The film partly functions as a documentary of what a day spent at Coney Island might’ve looked like in the 1950s, jumping from attraction to attraction with the giddy enthusiasm of a child with no parents around to say no. However, most of Joey’s journey through the park’s carnival attractions is heavily subjective. The camera is held at Joey’s height, returning audiences to a childhood world where everything you experience is eye-level with adults’ butts. Circus clown automatons are shot from low angles, appearing as disconcertingly jolly jump scares. In the brief period when Joey runs out of money and hasn’t yet figured out a scheme to earn his keep collecting glass bottles, he becomes a kind of ghost, totally ignored by everyone else at the park, as if this were more of a meaningful precursor to Carnival of Souls than 400 Blows. It’s documentary, sure, but it’s all distored through a child’s funhouse mirror perspective on the world of adults.

It’s difficult to tell a story through a child’s worldview without becoming overly saccharine, but Engel & Orkin manage just fine. Young Joey’s obsession with horses (inspired by his addiction to cowboy-themed TV shows) starts as a cutesy character detail, but it gets outright pathological by the time he’s collecting armfuls of bottles for another small taste of the 25¢ pony rides. Despite the title, he’s never in any real danger or trouble, and the only threats to his innocence are in having to learn how to make his way in the world. He quickly learns that if he wants to ride the ponies again, he’s going to have to work hard enough to earn the money himself, which in this case entails collecting trash from distracted adults who are making & passing out on the nearby beach. In that way, the film also starts to resemble another much-memed phenomenon from recent years: the Japanese game show Old Enough!, in which young children are tasked to run errands usually handled by their parents, while filmed from a safe distance. Regardless of whether it’s in reality-TV gameshows, vintage newspaper clippings & comic strips, or classic French cinema, it’s fun to watch kids figure out how to navigate the world without adult supervision. The trick is just to keep in mind that they’re people—however small & inexperienced—not adorable, chipper mascots who say the darndest things.

-Brandon Ledet