Through the Eyes of a Child: The Films of Independent Pioneer Morris Engel

There’s a scene halfway through 1958’s Weddings and Babies, the third feature by photographer turned filmmaker Morris Engel, that captures the essence of this dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker’s brief but vivid oeuvre. Al (John Myhers), an aspiring filmmaker and the current frustrated owner of a modest photography studio in Little Italy, has just invested in a spiffy new movie camera that can be operated by hand and record synchronous sound (the same camera, incidentally, that the film was shot on). Skirting other pressing matters, he takes it for a debut spin around the neighborhood, and Engel responds to his protagonist’s gleeful, wordless observation with a candid awe of his own in a sequence that plays like an homage to the spirited high of capturing life through a camera. On several occasions, as Al glimpses through the viewfinder, Engel cuts to approximations of his field of view, momentarily implying that filmmaker and subject have become one.

This self-effacing submission to subject and environment is key to Engel’s films. Primarily known for his unadorned snapshots of New York City street life, a practice that established him as a mainstay of the Photo League and the city’s thriving pre- and post-war photography scenes, Engel, like Al, turned his sights to the potential of amateur filmmaking technology and scored a runaway hit with his 1953 feature debut, Little Fugitive. Co-directed with his wife and fellow photographer, Ruth Orkin, and Ray Ashley, the film is a shaggy day-in-the-life portrait of a wide-eyed seven-year-old, Joey (Richie Andrusco), who, thinking that his older brother, Lennie (Richard Brewster), is dead after a cruel prank, ends up having the best day of his young life. While his single mother (Winifred Cushing) is out of town, Joey wanders off to Coney Island, and the film directs all its attention to the boy breathlessly hopscotching between carnival attractions, suggesting a puppy being enticed in all directions.

Little Fugitive made a substantial mark in large part because of its charming modesty. Shot for just $30,000 on a handheld 35mm camera that Engel jerry-rigged himself for an efficient documentary-style workflow that John Cassavetes would co-opt six years later, the film won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and caught the attention of François Truffaut, who would later credit it with kickstarting the French New Wave. While Engel appreciated such worldly acclaim—and rode it to an Oscar screenwriting nomination (shared with Orkin and Ashley) and a box office gross that quadrupled the film’s budget—his passion and attention ultimately remained on his home turf, and the three subsequent independent narrative features that he produced bring the same rapt urban observation on display in Little Fugitive to bear on other Big Apple neighborhoods. Whatever their other merits, Engel’s films are, above all, perceptive street-level time capsules of a city, capturing the lives of ordinary working New Yorkers and the textures of their environment with an intimacy and affection that was clearly informed by his lived-in familiarity of the day-to-day happenings of the city.

The Upper West Side is the backdrop for 1956’s Lovers and Lollipops, building on a conversance with the Central Park-adjacent streets that Engel and Orkin called home for decades. Like Little Fugitive, the film has a child and a single mother at its core, but here the filmmakers balance the focus, exploring an increasingly fraught mother-daughter relationship. Ann (Lori March) is dating Larry (Gerald O’Loughlin), and her daughter, Peggy (Cathy Dunn), is growing jealous. Engel and Orkin privilege neither the stubborn kid nor her increasingly exasperated mother. One delicately observed scene after another touches on a different facet of this evolving dynamic, with Peggy turning on a dime from obnoxious neediness to withdrawn confusion and Ann struggling to maintain composure as she attempts to negotiate her love for her daughter and her strengthening romance. Even the well-mannered Larry emerges as a complex figure; initially gentle and accommodating, he eventually reveals an impatience and callousness as his plans and projections don’t so easily pan out.

Both Little Fugitive and Lovers and Lollipops were shot without synchronized sound, giving their dialogue scenes an ungainly quality—an issue that presents itself more often in the latter film, which centers much of its dramatic action on Ann’s humble living room. True to their photographic backgrounds, however, Engel and Orkin thrive on sequences of pure action and observation, where an instinct for placing the camera in the right place at the right time rings tension, humor, or tenderness out of any given moment. Little Fugitive is a montage-oriented film; rarely do any of its scenes last longer than 30 seconds, and it generates a ping-ponging rhythm in the alternation between shots of carnival rides and landscape shots juxtaposing Joey’s smallness against the unfamiliar hustle-bustle of the world around him. Lovers and Lollipops gestures toward a more dynamic mise-en-scéne, often letting tensions within a single shot play out across longer durations—an idea charmingly orchestrated in a scene of mischief-making at MoMA that evokes the multi-plane visual comedy of Jacques Tati.

Engel, sitting solo in the director’s chair, would take yet another formal leap with Weddings and Babies, for which he was able to utilize sync-sound recording thanks to a development for his handheld camera made possible by technician Otto Popelka. The long, plainly staged one-on-ones between Al and his girlfriend, Bea (Viveca Lindfors), that constitute the film’s emotional core offer a blueprint for so many scenes of domestic strife in American independent movies, confidently making the case for an artisanal cinema of tortured faces against white walls. Engel’s artistic zenith, Weddings and Babies finds Al in a moment of crisis. He’s tired of his uninspiring job shooting hallmark moments and wants to graduate to a life of caméra-stylo self-determination, while Bea, eyeing a more committed married life, is trying to find her place in that fantasy, and Al’s lonely mother (Chiarina Barile, an elderly Italian immigrant whose earthy presence is a testament to Engel’s gift for casting nonprofessionals) awaits death in a nearby nursing home. Gracefully handling these interlocking challenges would require maturity and self-sacrifice, and Al is simply not up to the task.

Engel’s overarching subject is the child within, an innocence he repeatedly links to both photography and movies. Nearly all of his protagonists wield cameras at one point or another, and nearly all of them also harbor an obsession with American westerns: Joey and Peggy both carry cap guns and long for the glow of the television screen, while Al speaks fondly of his encounters with dubbed cowboy pictures back in his native Italy. In Weddings and Babies, Al’s inability to shed this childlike wonder is inseparable from his inability to make any extra-personal commitments, and all of this is increasingly regarded by Engel with a tragic fatalism. Flanked by images of loneliness, with compositions often entrapping people in corners of rooms or wide-open spaces, the film culminates in a desolate climax set in the Staten Island cemetery where Al’s father is buried, and where his incompatible psychological burdens converge, setting the stage for an ending in which nothing is resolved or certain. Al ends up trudging down a church aisle that’s photographed from a high angle to suggest a dark tunnel—the same tunnel that his mother traversed earlier toward an equally discouraging future.

After Weddings and Babies, Engel’s own future was anything but laid out. He subsisted exclusively outside the film industry for a decade to respectable acclaim but little in the way of financial ballast. He made four documentary shorts throughout the ’60s before closing the books—temporarily, at least, for he’d direct two more documentaries in the ’90s—on his filmmaking career with 1968’s I Need a Ride to California. For unknown reasons, Engel never released the film, but despite a meandering structure and some technical blemishes, it’s hardly the failed experiment that fate would imply. Switching to vibrant color film and adopting the era’s cinematic fashions (non-linear storytelling, jarring editing, and playful self-reflexivity), the film might have made the impression of a fusty bid for relevance if not for Engel’s compassionate alignment with the youthful dreamers on screen.

Where Engel’s prior films were all heavily soundtrack-driven—“Home on the Range,” “Oh, My Darling Clementine,” and “Here Comes the Bride,” interpreted on various solo instruments, act as the themes for Little Fugitive, Lovers and Lollipops, and Weddings and Babies, respectively—I Need a Ride to California is a veritable jukebox film, filling nearly crevice of its runtime with bargain approximations of the era’s hippie folk (composers include Mark Barkan, Don Oriolo, Jim Lyons and Rolf Barnes). These jangly, wistful sounds—one track is fittingly titled “Through the Eyes of a Child”—underscore a smattering of scenes in the life of Lilly Shell, a barefooted bohemian playing herself in a freeform docudrama set in Greenwich Village. I Need a Ride to California opens with Lilly waxing poetic on the very film we’re about to see, arguing in her airy way that all actors ultimately play themselves, and that films should embrace the drama of the everyday. To a nearly formless degree, I Need a Ride to California does just that, free-associatively cutting between Lilly’s flings with different men and her happy-go-lucky strolls through the Lower East Side, camera always at the ready.

In her reckless abandon, the bright-eyed Lilly recalls seven-year-old Joey spinning around on all those Coney Island rides in Little Fugitive, only in I Need a Ride to California Engel takes greater pains to break the spell with harbingers of a darker reality: unsatisfactory boyfriends, a fleeting glimpse of a heroin needle, and, in the film’s shockingly misguided conclusion, a pair of rapists. Dark shadows such as these feel intrusive in Engel’s otherwise sunny filmography, and at the director’s best, he casts them subtly and pointedly, as in the shot of Joey reaching deep into his pockets to find his coin supply drained in Little Fugitive, or the heartbreaking montages of Al’s somnambulant mother plodding down the lively streets of Little Italy in Weddings and Babies. In moments like these, Engel betrays a deep-seated awareness of the inherent contradiction of life: that drudging reality is often irreconcilable with youthful spirit. Cinema, however, offered Engel a place to defy this inconvenient truth.

The Collected Films of Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin is now available on Kino Lorber Blu-ray.