User Reviews

One of the attractions in Coney Island around the turn of the century was Dreamland, where they had their own fire department which enacted its own firefighting scene. That's what we have here, an assembly and parade of those forces. Its audience includes civilians who seem caught between watching the horse platoon and the camera, particularly one young boy who, cap in hand, stares at the corner from the lower left of the screen.

It's shot in half a dozen short takes, which is a nice example of cutting at this stage of the movies' evolution. More important, the firefighting sequence seems to have inspired Edwin S. Porter in his direction of his seminal "Life of an American Fireman." This is in no wise a particularly great film, as it merely covers a well-known performance, but it leads elsewhere and is worth at least one view for that.

This film cannot very well have inspired by Life of an American Fireman which was made a year earlier. William Reynolds' Dreamland was an entirely new attraction park in Coney Island in 1904 and "Fighting the Flames" (although it was a copy of the "Fire and Flames" spectacle at the rival Luna Park which opened in 1903 may well itself have inspired The Adventures of an American Fireman) was one of their principal attractions.

Edison at this time was pursuing a typically mean policy of copying everything that Mutoscope did Mean because it was not merely rivalry - one forgives Sigmund Lubin everything including his version of Life of An American Fireman which did come out in 1904 and which one would love to be able to see - but part of a concerted and spiteful last-ditch attempt by Edison to put Mutoscope out of business. Anyway, after this film was made, Edwin Porter was sent to film the equivalent Luna Park spectacle later the same month. This Mutocope version, in all probability shot by Billy Bitzer, who did most the filming at Coney Island, is a far better, more elaborate film than Porter's (which actually looks rather like a one-shot out-take from LoAF).