Little Fugitive is a 1953 American independent film co-written and co-directed by Raymond Abrashkin (credited as Ray Ashley), Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin, which tells the story of a child alone on Coney Island. It stars Richie Andrusco as the title character, and Richard Brewster as his older brother. The film was screened at 14th Venice International Film Festival, where it was awarded the Silver Lion, and nominated for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story, at the 26th Academy Awards. An acknowledged influence on the French New Wave, the film is considered by modern-day critics to be a landmark film because of its naturalistic style and groundbreaking use of nonprofessional actors in lead roles. In 1997, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film is the first and best known of Engel's three feature films. It was followed by Lovers and Lollipops in 1956 and Weddings and Babies, which was filmed in 1957 and released in 1960. All three films were stylistically similar and were filmed with hand-held 35 mm cameras. The cameras used for Little Fugitive and Lovers and Lollipops did not record sound, so the dialogue and sound effects had to be dubbed subsequent to filming, but Weddings and Babies holds the distinction of being the first fictional feature filmed with a portable camera that allowed for synchronized sound. Plot Seven-year-old Joey Norton lives in an apartment in a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Brooklyn. During the summer, his older brother Lennie has to watch him when their widowed mother is at work, which Lennie resents somewhat. Joey loves horses and likes playing with Lennie and his friends, though they often pick on him. On Lennie's twelfth birthday, he gets a harmonica and some money to spend at Coney Island, where he is excited to go the next day with his friends Harry and Charlie. When he and Joey get home for lunch, however, they learn their grandmother has fallen ill and their mother is leaving for a day to care for her, which means Lennie will have to postpone his trip to Coney Island so he can stay home and babysit Joey. Frustrated, Lennie finds his friends and tells them the news, and they imagine various outlandish and macabre ways of dispatching Joey before deciding to play a prank. Harry steals his