Images - Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin

video series review by Gary Morris -- page 2 of 2

Gerald O'Loughlin and Cathy Dunn in Lovers and Lollipops.

In spite of the commercial and critical success of Little Fugitive (which plays frequently on AMC these days), the filmmakers had trouble getting financing for their next work but somehow managed. Anyone who saw Little Fugitive would recognize Lovers and Lollipops (1955) as the work of the same team, even without the credits. Again we see the milieu of New York, rendered in gorgeous black-and-white compositions, and again we see a child at the center. This time it’s a girl, Peggy (Cathy Dunn), who recalls Joey Norton in her tenacity and willfulness. Both are imaginative kids with an active inner life who can entertain themselves and are well-equipped to deal with any adults who get in the way of their fun. Joey had no visible father, only brief, shadowy substitutes like the pony-ride man; Peggy’s father is dead, and she feels compelled to resist her mother Ann’s (Lori March) threat to replace him with a new one in the form of Larry (Gerald O’Louglin), an old friend who’s visiting. The story is a strange, alternately sweet and sad triangle—Ann and Larry’s precarious relationship and Peggy’s simultaneous attempts to thwart it and find her place in it.

In Little Fugitive, Joey’s interactions were mostly brief encounters with strangers on the beach. Lovers and Lollipops focuses closely on Peggy’s relationships with the adults in her life—her mother, Larry, a sarcastic babysitter, and a photographer who’s taking pictures of her for a book. In the process of coming to grips with her mother’s romantic life, she torments the indulgent Larry in the guise of spending "quality time" with him. During a scene where he reads to her, she crawls all over him, mimics and laughs at him, and interrupts him. This is a rehearsal for other, more cutting scenes where she causes endless grief by hiding from him in a parking lot (later she complains to her mother, "he lost me too!").

Cathy Dunn in Lovers and Lollipops.

Any attempt at romance by Ann and Larry is usually met with force by Peggy, who eventually offers a litany of his "crimes" in the martyred mode of a child: "He gave me a rotten sandwich and made me eat all of it!" Peggy’s convention-busting is at once enchanting and nerve-wracking; it filigrees the film, most notably in a scene where she insists on carrying her toy sailboat into a museum rather than checking it. She sneaks it in and sails it on one of the museum’s small pools, creating a poignant symbol of her own potential drifting away from her mother.

Naturalistic performances make Lovers and Lollipops as vivid and fresh today as when it was released, but the true star here, more even than in Little Fugitive, is the city. Engel and Orkin’s observations are again both casual and calculated, the camera unobtrusively recording images that seem unrelated to plot but hint at the imaginative life behind the faces and streets of the city. These take the form of detailed set-pieces, as in a long sequence on the Statue of Liberty; and of throwaway moments like the scene of a little Chinese boy spanking another boy in the background. The filmmakers insist on the validity of everyone’s lives, even those whose details we never see.

Viveca Lindfors and John Myhers in Weddings and Babies.

Weddings and Babies (1958) marked the end of a cycle—the third in what could loosely be called the filmmakers’ "New York Trilogy"—but also featured a technological breakthrough that allowed Engel and Orkin to create a movie with an immediacy unseen outside live theatre. In a September 1958 Harper’s article, documentarian Richard Leacock described it:

"Engel’s earlier films had been dubbed—that is, they had used a system perfected by the postwar Italian film-makers of shooting a scene with a silent camera and then fitting dialogue to it in the studio. This made it possible to photograph anywhere, without being chained to the big clumsy sound cameras or upset by 'extraneous noise.'… To my amazement, Weddings and Babies was not dubbed… Here was a feature theatrical film, shot on regular 35-mm stock, with live spontaneous sound…. [it] is the first theatrical motion picture to make use of a fully mobile, synchronous sound-and-picture system."

Leacock theorizes that what spurred this invention was the fact that the filmmakers were used to taking their still cameras to various sites, a kind of mobility impossible with traditional equipment. They wanted to replicate this ease in their film, and the result, Weddings and Babies, is in some ways even more remarkable than the earlier efforts. Part of its freshness today is because of the "live spontaneous sound"—from the noises of a street fair to the rising voices in one of the film's many domestic squabbles. The sometimes clumsy effect of post-dubbed dialogue in the earlier films is absent here.

Viveca Lindfors and John Myhers in Weddings and Babies.

Weddings and Babies, like its predecessors, is a highly personal film, a kind of insider view of working-class life that resonates with the filmmakers’ sweet sensibility. Engel seems to have written himself discreetly into both Little Fugitive and Lovers and Lollipops in the form of minor characters who were photographers. In Weddings and Babies, the main male character can be read as a virtual double. Al, (John Mhyers), like Engel, is a commercial photographer whose hunger to "do something important" is frustrated by the compromises of his business, which exists because he’s willing to spend all his time shooting "weddings and babies." Al’s girlfriend Bea (a radiant Viveca Lindfors) wants precisely the thing that he’s come to hate: a wedding and babies. Added to the mix is Al’s aged mother, Mama (Chiarina Barile), who like him is restless, unsatisfied. Just as Al roams the streets with his camera, trying to find something that eludes him in the bustle of street crowds and fairs, his mother wanders away from her rest home and eventually disappears at a key moment in her son’s life—just as he’s resigned himself to marrying Bea. Mama embodies the film’s theme of the inability of people to communicate in the most literal way possible—she speaks not English but Italian, and in a low voice that’s barely audible.

In all these films, awesome natural forces are always nearby, waiting to remind the characters that there are larger elements of life that must be respected. In Little Fugitive, it’s the rainstorm that sends the beach revelers running, bringing a sense that happiness is short-lived and therefore precious. In Weddings and Babies, it’s more overt in an extended sequence in a cemetery, where a frantic Al finds his "lost" mother sitting glumly among the tombstones. These scenes assert the importance of noticing the pleasures of everyday life, an almost Buddhist-like awareness of simply being alive and living "in the moment." This is the lesson the "fully mobile, synchronous sound-and-picture system," wedded to the filmmakers’ gentle sensibility, brings home.

In a sense, these films are, like the rain in Little Fugitive, a cleansing process, as all the things that separate people from what’s really important in their lives—each other—are stripped away. It’s only after a serious loss is threatened—the disappearances of Joey, Larry, and Bea in, respectively, Little Fugitive, Lovers and Lollipops, and Weddings and Babies—that the value of the individual is recognized and the recovery of something irreplaceable occurs. This is what Truffaut, Cassavettes, and Scorsese recognized, and what makes these films continue to be fresh, timeless works of art.

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"The Films of Morris Engel With Ruth Orkin": The three videos comprising this set are available from Kino on Video. Suggested retail price: $79.95 for Little Fugitive and $39.95 each for Lovers and Lollipops and Weddings and Babies. For more information, we suggest you check out the Kino Web site: http://www.kino.com.

Gary Morris is the editor and publisher of Bright Lights Film Journal (http://www.brightlightsfilm.com). He writes regularly for the Bay Area Reporter and SF Weekly.