Sadly Over-hyped

Best movie ever!

An Exercise In Nonsense

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The Edison team of William Heise and W.K.L. Dickson work together to create this short film. It features a firemn, standing on a ladder, rescuing children from a burning building. He hands the children to another fireman, while smoke twirls around them.Various firefighting themes where very popular during the beginnings of film. From staged runs of fire trucks to short scenes of firemen rescuing victims, people from the turn-of-the-century loved watching anything to do with firefighting. Heise would go on to film other firefighting movies, such as "The Morning Alarm".I give it a 2 out of 10 as an important early short film.

The title says it all already what this short film is about. The house is burning, smoke is everywhere and a fireman climbs up a ladder to get a woman out. He carries her, hands her forward to another one waiting downstairs and she is in safety. Is all good now? Not really. Her little child is also still caught in the flames, but rescue is near. The execution is done very convincingly in this one. It's totally clear what happens in these 30 seconds and this can certainly not be said about every movie shot during that very early period of filmmaking. Good effort from silent film dream team Dickson and Heise here and one to watch for admirers of the early days of cinema.

. . . as their fire department takes another day off to pose for Thomas Edison's cameras. Many New York City area landmarks (including the Durland Academy) bit the dust as soon as Edison began monopolizing the time of the local Hosemen to "fight" fake fires in his film studios, and to stage miles-long bogus fire runs into the middle of nowhere so old Tom could still have his "film at 11," as the expression goes. Though only four sworn protectors of the public appear in camera frame during FIRE RESCUE SCENE, their uniforms indicate that these guys are from FOUR DIFFERENT FIRE DEPARTMENTS, the remainders of which are no doubt watching Nero--oops, I mean Edison--fiddle as Rome, NY, along with the rest of the southeastern Empire State, plus probably parts of Jersey and Connecticut, burn.

From my studies of early films, it seems filmmakers at the turn of the 20th Century were fascinated with, perhaps more so than with any other subject, fire and firemen at work. That fascination began here, as with so many firsts in film history, in the "Black Maria" at the Edison Laboratories. The Edison Company, American Mutoscope, the Lumière Company and probably just about every other filmmaker took to making actuality films, or documentaries, of firemen putting out fires, or they staged fire scenes such as the one here. Some filmmakers became fire-engine chasers; in one film, "Atlantic City Fire Department" (1897), the camera was accidentally run over by a horse-drawn fire engine. In early, multi-shot fictional story films, firefighting remained a popular subject, such as in James Williamson's "Fire!" (1901) and Edwin S. Porter's "Life of an American Fireman"(1903).The production values within these 50 feet of film from 1894 and within the cramped space of the "Black Maria" shanty are quite remarkable. In under a minute, four firefighters, one of which is on a ladder and another holding a hose spraying water, rescue two children from what spectators would assume to be the second story of a burning building located out of frame. (Of course, there was no two-story structure within the "Black Maria".) Smoke covers most of the background of the scene, except for, the careful viewer will notice, the "R" logo in the lower lefthand corner, which stands for Raff & Gammon, who funded this Edison Company production. This film must have been rather exciting to spectators peeking through the peepholes of the Kinetoscopes; in a way, "Fire Rescue Scene" was the 19th Century equivalent of the big action flick, complete with the special effect of smoke.