The fireman

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Movie
German title The fireman
Original title The Fireman
The Fireman (poster) .jpg
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1916
length 2 rolls, 32 minutes
Rod
Director Charlie Chaplin ,
Edward Brewer
script Charlie Chaplin,
Vincent Bryan ,
Maverick Terell
production Mutual Film Co.
camera William C. Foster ,
Roland Totheroh
cut Charlie Chaplin
occupation

The fireman , alternatively Chaplin in the fire department or Charlie as a firefighter , is a film by Charlie Chaplin from 1916. Chaplin was also responsible for the script (with Vincent Bryan and Maverick Terell) and editing. It was his second film for the Mutual Co. The film was released on June 12, 1916 in US cinemas.

action

Fireman Charlie and his boss both vie for the same girl's favor. His father has secretly agreed with the fire chief to have his house burned down in order to collect the sum insured.

The neighboring property also catches fire. The firefighters simply ignore its owner, who wants to guide you to the scene of the fire by first activating the fire alarm, then calling the fire station and finally showing up at the fire station in person. Finally, Charlie alerts the fire chief and the troops move out to fight the fire.

Then the insurance fraudster notices that his daughter is still in the burning house. Fireman Charlie heroically climbs the facade of the building and brings it to safety.

background

The move from Essanay to Mutual Co. for a previously unpaid annual fee of 670,000 US dollars made Chaplin the highest paid comedian in Hollywood at the time. To do this, he should deliver a dozen two-reelers within a year .

More significant for his development was that he was now contractually granted further freedoms. Probably the most important of these was the guarantee of unrestricted artistic control. This gave him more time to prepare his films and wait for good ideas. The Lone Star Studio was made available to him, which was intended exclusively for the production of his comedies. Finally, at Mutual , Chaplin was able to gather a select group of reliable employees around him with Edna Purviance, Albert Austin, Eric Campbell, Henry Bergman and the cameraman 'Rollie' Totheroh, whose hard core remained loyal to him to the end.

The shooting of the "Fireman" took place in the vicinity of Los Angeles: the exterior shots in the early morning on the street, the interior scenes in the Lone Star Studio . The photographers were William C. Foster and Roland Totheroh , with whom Chaplin had worked since 1915.

Many of the gags are chosen with care. Even the preparations of the firefighters for their service in the prologue of the film have ballet-like features: like the pyramid of a gymnastics club, they pose on the fire engine in front of their captain. Charlie, who overslept the mission, has his hands full preparing food and drink for his comrades at the fire station; With the skilful movements of a card player, he brings the plates into the right position on the table from the wrist. The boiler of the steam syringe serves as a source of warm water for morning coffee, Charlie smears his neck with the oil can as if he were a machine himself. And like one, it automatically performs all drill movements when the alarm bell sounds, where they are not needed. Some strange effects were caused with the camera turned backwards.

In 1932, the owner of Van Beuren Studios, Amedee van Beuren, bought Chaplins for Mutual comedies for US $ 10,000. He added music by Gene Rodemich and Winston Sharples to them , added sound effects and distributed them as sound films through RKO Radio Pictures without Chaplin being able to take legal action against him.

Reviews

" The Fireman : sheer directorial virtuosity that transforms a simple story about two firefighters, a beautiful woman and their deceitful father into a wonderfully veristically based spectacle of jokes and sensations."

- RH at filmmuseum.at

“There were several masterpieces among the films at the Mutual Society. One o'clock at night , The Vagabond , The Pawn Shop , Behind the Screen and others. While The Store Keeper and The Fireman were less successful, the best characteristic features of the Chaplinaden were found in his films Easy Street and The Immigrant . The origin of these two films can be found in Chaplin's life, and it is an old saying that the clown is always best when he mimes his own life. "

- Robert Payne: The Great Charlie

Re-releases

The culture channel Arte showed the "firefighter" on Christmas Day, December 25, 2013 on German television. The music was contributed by Robert Israel.

Several publishers have meanwhile put the “Fireman” on DVD on the market.

literature

  • Alan Bilton: Silent Film Comedy and American Culture. Palgrave Macmillan Publisher, 2013, ISBN 978-1-137-02025-3 .
  • Heinrich Fraenkel: Immortal Film. The great chronicle. From the magic lantern to the sound film. Part of the picture by Wilhelm Winckel. Kindler, Munich 1956, pp. 176-178, 393.
  • Daniel Ira Goldmark, Charles Keil (Eds.): Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood. (= UPCC book collections on Project MUSE). University of California Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-520-95012-2 , p. 55.
  • Lawrence Howe, James E. Caron, Benjamin Click: Refocusing Chaplin. A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses. Scarecrow Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-8108-9226-2 .
  • Susan McCabe: Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film. Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-521-84621-8 .
  • Robert Payne: The Great Charlie. A Biography of the Tramp. Andre Deutsch, London 1952.
  • Guido Marc Pruys: The rhetoric of film synchronization: how foreign feature films are censored, changed and viewed in Germany. (= Media Library: Studies. Volume 14). Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 1997, ISBN 3-8233-4283-5 .
  • Mark Shiel: Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles. Reaction Books, 2013, ISBN 978-1-86189-940-8 .
  • Johannes Schmitt: Charlie Chaplin. A dramaturgical study. Lit-Verlag, Münster 2006, ISBN 3-8258-9317-0 .
  • Karl Schnog: Charlie Chaplin - film genius and philanthropist. Henschel, Berlin (East) 1960.
  • Friedrich von Zglinicki: The way of the film. History of cinematography and its predecessors. Rembrandt Verlag, Berlin 1956.

Web links

Commons : The Fireman  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Items:

Illustrations:

  • Advertisement Charlie Chaplin's footprints on the Great White Way , about Chaplin performances on Broadway
  • Modern Serbo-Croatian movie poster

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Zglinicki, p. 519.
  2. ↑ cf. Stummfilm.at stummfilm.at
  3. ↑ cf. Robert Byrne, essay
  4. ↑ cf. deacademic.com universal_lexikon.deacademic.com
  5. ^ Robert Byrne, essay: “While at Mutual, Chaplin assembled a dedicated company, the core of which stuck with him their entire careers. Edna Purviance appeared as his leading lady in all 34 films that he made between 1915 and 1923. Screen newcomers Albert Austin and Eric Campbell, whom Chaplin knew from his vaudeville days, also never worked for any other moviemaker. Henry Bergman, the only one of Chaplin's players who joined Mutual with extensive film experience, appeared in every Chaplin film for the next 20 years. Cameraman Rollie Totheroh photographed Chaplin's films through 1947's "Monsieur Verdoux."
  6. ^ Bilton p. 98.
  7. ^ McCabe p. 91.
  8. ↑ z. B. “parking” the team in front of the fire engine, or Charlie's shooting up at the post in the guard where he had just slipped down
  9. ↑ cf. WaverBoy, entry # 285, 29 May 2007 silentcomedians.com ( Memento from January 13, 2014 in the web archive archive.today )
  10. ↑ cf. Article at filmmuseum.at
  11. ↑ cit. in Zglinicki, p. 517.
  12. ↑ cf. arte.tv arte.tv ( Memento of the original from February 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arte.tv
  13. ↑ gl. Achim Lewandowski: DVD Recommendation No. 7 - Films with Charlie Chaplin alewand.de