After their mother leaves them home alone in New York for the weekend, seven-year-old Joey is tricked into thinking he has killed his brother with an air rifle, so he runs away to the funfair at Coney Island. He wants to get lost in the rides and the spectacle, and he does. Filmmaker Morris Engel and his team see so much in him: a cowboy, the boy in George Stevens’s Shane and the child in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid. A film this fresh could not have been made in America in the 1950s, and yet somehow it was. François Truffaut was an admirer of Little Fugitive, crediting it as an inspiration for the French New Wave.