DailyView: Day 208, Movie 294

Another busy day so I had to dip into the Charlie Chaplin vault to pull out another silent short to complete the DailyView. Today, it was a film on YouTube called The Fireman from 1916.

Charlie is a fireman this time, whose chief (Eric Campbell) made an arrangement with the father (Lloyd Bacon) of a beautiful daughter (Edna Purviance) to allow his house to burn down so he could collect the insurance money. In return, the father agreed to let the chief marry his daughter.

As other fires break out in the city, the firemen finally answer the call, thanks to Chaplin.

Turned out that the father set his house on fire without knowing that his daughter was upstairs. Chaplin scaled the outside of the building to save her, showing one of the more impressive stunts of the time.

Honestly, while I have typically enjoyed the Charlie Chaplin short films during this DailyView, this one was kind of boring. I loved the stunt of climbing the building, but I had checked out of the film in the first 15 minutes or so. The slapstick did not do it for me.

This was an early film in Charlie Chaplin’s career and many people seemed to love it. However, after seeing a bunch of the other ones first, The Fireman felt too much the same.