In an elegant apartment a maid prepares to light the fire, and something goes wrong. The room fills with smoke, the owners run in to open the window, the neighbours get into a state, and a chimney-sweep and the fire brigade are called in. Thanks to the firemen the cause of the sudden mishap is revealed: two thieves perched on the roof have blocked the chimney with bundles of rags. The firemen see to it that jets of water from a firehose “refresh the ideas” of the two malefactors.
The original 35mm version of this simple story revealed from the beginning that the criminals planned to smoke out the building’s first-floor residents, which would have aborted the feeling of suspense accidently created by the initial gap in this 28mm copy, from which more than a minute of action is missing.
The effectiveness of this little picture, in any case, once again lies in tiny details: in the brief but precise characterizations (note for example the two Bohemian artists, not by chance lodged in a lofty garret, who laugh at the troubles of their well-off neighbours), the harmony between the built interiors (the sumptuous display of rugs and upholstery in these bourgeois interiors!) and the outdoor scenes on street corners never chosen by chance, but always characterized by some small touch of local colour able to attract the audience’s interest. In the finale, as is often the case in rooftop scenes in Pathé films, the painted canvas backdrop that represents the expanse of the city’s roofs and chimney pots gives the shot a faintly surreal look, almost like a lunar landscape.
While early French cinema often depicted the police and “guards” as figures of fun (in this programme, we can cite Filendouce est insaisissable and A Simple Mistake), the real heroes of the situation in this film are the firemen, ready to save lives and safeguard the integrity of the private home, the temple of the family and its decorum – an institution, in the comedies of the period, constantly under attack by thieves, fires, incompetent servants, and cars falling from roofs (another reference to Filendouce est insaisissable). In this specific instance, the firemen are not called to perform any particularly courageous deeds, but their grand entrance on a horse-drawn fire engine with a hydraulic pump was probably one of the film’s main attractions at the time, leaving no doubt regarding the authority with which they would be able to handle the situation.

Stella Dagna