Fire! Earliest Firefighter Movies (with Bonus Fire Dog!)
Filmmakers, like moths, are attracted to flames. Since the very beginning of commercial cinema, movie makers have dramatized the heroics of firefighters, beginning with two shorts in 1896 from Edison Films, A Morning Alarm and Going to the Fire.
Despite the low resolution of these 121 year-old films, the sense of action and urgency leaps out at the viewer, who must marvel at the handicaps faced by these trailblazing firefighters, whipping their horse teams to frothing in order to get their steam-driven pumpers to the site of the fire. We moderns must count our innumerable blessings as best we can… among them, fire trucks powered by internal combustion engines, water mains, building fire codes, and fire retardant uniforms for our firefighters.
Next up, representing a tremendous leap in narrative and film-making sophistication (if not of fire-fighting tech itself), is James Williamson’s 1901 British film Fire! Film historian Michael Brooke has noted that this was the first film to be divided into separate scenes, which, when edited together, both tell a story and build suspense. First, an alert bobby notices smoke streaming from the window of a home. He rushes to the local fire brigade, which trundles out its ladder wagon and horse-drawn pumper. The scene switches to the interior of the burning house, where a resident tries to escape the flames but faints onto his bed. A fireman (wearing a glorious helmet that looks like a Greco-Roman war helmet) uses his ax to smash in the window. He crawls through with his hose and douses the fire in that room, then loads the prostrate man onto his shoulder and climbs down the ladder. The next scene shows other firemen rescuing a child from the lower story, and the whole crew spreading out a tarp to catch a woman who leaps from an upper floor window. Still thrilling a hundred and sixteen years later!
Fire! served as the inspiration for the next film to lionize firefighters, this one back on the American side of the Atlantic, and again from Edison Films. Life of an American Fireman (1903) was one of the very first American narrative films, a movie which told a story. It is made up of seven scenes, which tops Fire!’s five, and is also nearly fifty percent longer, at just over six minutes. It was filmed by Edwin S. Porter, who became famous for another film he shot that same year, The Great Train Robbery, the first blockbuster film.
Life of an American Fireman was selected by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2016 for preservation due to its being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. In many ways, it is a wonderful little film. I think the most memorable scene is an exterior shot of the huge firehouse, when the doors swing open and a full squadron of pumper wagons and ladder wagons, drawn by teams of horses, bursts onto the street. We get to see the station’s fire dog (quite possibly the very first depiction of a fire dog on film!) racing back and forth with excitement as his masters leave the station with all their equipment. Later, as the fire squadron races past a city park, onlookers have gathered, and their dogs, excited by all the tumult, follow the horses in the direction of the fire. I wonder whether the involvement of so many canine thespians was planned by Porter or was a felicitous accident.
These four films can be considered the distant ancestors of such big-screen hits as The Towering Inferno, Hellfighters, and Backdraft. Hollywood and other centers of world cinema will always find the heroics of the world’s firefighters an irresistible source of drama and spectacle.
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Best Cinematic Tribute to America’s Firefighters? Try The Towering Inferno
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