[Deathwatch] Morris Engel, filmmaker, 86

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Morris Engel, 86, a Pioneer in Independent Film, Dies
By DAVE KEHR

Published: March 7, 2005

Morris Engel, the New York photographer and filmmaker whose 1953 film,
"The Little Fugitive," established a model for independent moviemaking
that influenced directors like John Cassavetes and François Truffaut,
died Saturday at his home on Central Park West. He was 86.

The cause was cancer, said his son, Andy Engel.

"The Little Fugitive" tells the story of a 7-year-old Brooklyn boy,
played by Richie Andrusco, who mistakenly believes he has killed his
older brother and runs away to hide at Coney Island. The movie was made
on a budget of $30,000 using a lightweight 35-millimeter camera that
Mr. Engel had developed with a friend, Charlie Woodruff. The small,
unobtrusive camera allowed Mr. Engel to film his tale with an intimacy
and realism that seemed revolutionary in a time when the Hollywood
dream factory was functioning at its fantastic height.

The simple, disarming film, with its street-level views of ordinary New
Yorkers going about their lives, proved to have an international
appeal. It won the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, and
its story, by Mr. Engel, his soon-to-be wife, Ruth Orkin, and Ray
Ashley, a journalist who had been a colleague of Mr. Engel's at the
newspaper PM, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1954.

The movie's success encouraged other young filmmakers to circumvent the
Hollywood system and finance their own resolutely personal films. In
1957, the young actor John Cassavetes borrowed $40,000 to make
"Shadows," a partly improvised drama whose success opened the door to
other New York independent filmmakers.

In 1959, the French film critic François Truffaut drew on Mr. Engel's
childhood themes and production techniques to create "The 400 Blows,"
the film that introduced the French New Wave. "Our New Wave would never
have come into being if it hadn't been for the young American Morris
Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine
movie, 'Little Fugitive,' " Mr. Truffaut later told Lillian Ross in an
interview for The New Yorker.

Born in Brooklyn in 1918, Mr. Engel took courses as a teenager at the
Photo League, a cooperative founded by a group of socially engaged
photographers, where one his teachers was Berenice Abbott. He had his
first show at the New School for Social Research in 1939, worked
briefly for PM and then entered the Navy, where as a combat
photographer he covered the Normandy landing. After the war, Mr. Engel
became a busy photojournalist, working for a wide range of publications
including McCall's and Collier's.

With Ms. Orkin, herself a gifted photographer, Mr. Engel made two more
independent features: "Lovers and Lollipops" (1956), about a small girl
struggling with the idea of her widowed mother's remarriage, and
"Weddings and Babies" (1958), an autobiographical study of a
photographer whose artistic ambitions are thwarted by his fiancée's
dreams of domesticity. Neither enjoyed the success of "The Little
Fugitive."

Mr. Engel returned to his work as a commercial photographer and did not
make another feature until "I Need a Ride to California" in 1968, a
drama about East Village hippies that remains unreleased. Later in
life, he worked on video documentaries, including "A Little Bit
Pregnant" (1993) and "Camelia" (1998).

"He was a street photographer his whole life," said his daughter, Mary
Engel. "Through the 90's, he shot wide, color panoramas of the streets
that have never really been exhibited, and we are working on that." The
writer-director Joanna Lipper recently shot a remake of "The Little
Fugitive," which Ms. Engel co-produced.

Besides his son and daughter, Mr. Engel is survived by two sisters,
Pearl Russell and Helen Siemianowski, and a grandson. Ms. Orkin died in
1985.