SummaryThe winner of the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival tells the story of Joey, a young boy who runs away to Coney Island after he is tricked into believing he has killed his older brother.
SummaryThe winner of the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival tells the story of Joey, a young boy who runs away to Coney Island after he is tricked into believing he has killed his older brother.
The film's genius is how completely it tunes in to his 
experience, delicately outlining Joey's private moments of shame, elation, despondency, and pride.
There's influential, and then there's this 1953 microbudgeted beauty, one that's made its way into the DNA of everything from cinema vérité to the French New Wave.
The film's beguiling visual poetry and smatterings of sociological subtext function less than coherently as transitional markers between cinematic epochs, or even as the nascent burblings of any imminent DIY revolution; instead, they're redolent of a modernist apotheosis.
This is a world where people still put out wash to dry on fire escapes, watermelon has seeds, amusement park rides cost 9 cents. Joey is the little fugitive of the title, of course, but at the heart of the movie, as its makers could never have imagined 60 years ago, is a much bigger fugitive: time itself.