E-Mail This Article to a Friend Neorealism, Brooklyn style Ruth Orkin and Morris Engel at the HFA BY GERALD PEARY

Born in 1921, Ruth Orkin grew up in LA with aspirations of becoming a cinematographer. Because the all-male unions said no to a distaff director of photography, she came East to New York. Too bad for Hollywood, swell for photography and independent cinema.

The photos Orkin took from inside her Manhattan apartment (A World Through My Window, etc.) are classics of Zen-like composition. The movies she made with her photographer husband, Morris Engel, are less famous, but they’re pioneers, low-budget black-and-white 35mm features ("the New York trilogy") done in the 1950s at a time when there was no tradition of American independent narratives. Two decades before Sundance!

Fortunately for us, the Orkin-Engel collaborations (she editing, he photographing, the two of them directing) have been restored by Kino Films and will be screening at the Harvard Film Archive this weekend. In Little Fugitive (1953; October 21 + 23), a single mom in Brooklyn leaves her feisty, freckle-faced seven-year-old, Joey (Richie Andrusco), in the hands of Lennie (Richard Brewster), his annoyed 12-year-old brother. Lennie and his pals concoct a sadistic trick, convincing Joey that he’s shot Lennie dead, whereupon the frightened tyke scoots off by subway to Coney Island. Surrounded by the amusements there, he forgets his "murdered" brother and has a great old time, at the carnival park, then down below on the packed beach.

Orkin and Engel have been labeled as American Neorealists, and indeed, in the manner of Vittorio De Sica in Ladri di biciclette|The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D, they relate tiny, simple stories, use non-actors in almost all the roles, and shoot by placing their performers in the streets. Unlike the Italian Neorealists, however, they’re not political filmmakers. In Little Fugitive, we see Coney Island from the point of view of a curious, enterprising, feverishly active child. Mini-sized Richie Andrusco is endlessly entertaining, whether he’s chowing down watermelon, swinging a 36-inch bat in a batting cage, or returning piles of empty Coke bottles for the two-cents deposit. Part Little Rascal, part a diminutive Buster Keaton, he proved a tremendous discovery for the moviemakers, who simply let him go and filmed. A natural!

Lovers and Lollipops (1956; October 22-23) has another arresting seven-year-old, Cathy Dunn, as Peggy, the haughty, moody daughter of young widow Ann (Lori March). She gets jealous as her mom becomes entangled with, then engaged to, a gentleman suitor (Gerald O’Loughlin). The focus in this movie switches between Peggy and Ann, who pines for a life in the suburbs. Maybe there is a social theme after all: What Does a Woman Want in the 1950s?

In Weddings and Babies (1958); October 22 + 24), a Swedish woman (Viveca Lindfors) in New York weeps bitter tears: she’s turning 30, and she craves a hubby and toddlers. Orkin and Engel had two children, Andy and Mary; Mary Engel will introduce the October 21 screening of Little Fugitive and also show a documentary short she made about her late mother.