Fires Were Started (1943)
★★½ — Fires Were Started (1943)
Humphrey Jennings made Fires Were Started for the Crown Film Unit, the British government's wartime documentary arm, at a point when morale films were considered as essential to the war effort as munitions. Jennings had already established himself as one of the unit's finest talents with Listen to Britain (1942), and this 70-minute feature, his most ambitious work to that point, cast real members of the National Fire Service rather than professional actors. Filmed on location in London's bombed-out East End during 1942, it portrays a single night of firefighting during the Blitz, drawing on recent lived experience rather than reconstruction. The result sits somewhere between documentary and drama, a form the British wartime cinema had quietly made its own.
Fires Were Started (1943) is a curious hybrid (part docudrama, part propaganda, part historical artefact) crafted in the thick of World War II by filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. Blending real firefighters with scripted scenes, it follows a new recruit’s first day with the National Fire Service during the Blitz, capturing the grim routine of wartime Britain with stark realism. The black-and-white cinematography, often shot on location amid actual bombed-out streets and smouldering ruins, lends it an undeniable immediacy; you can almost smell the soot and hear the distant wail of sirens. For that alone, it’s fascinating, a film not just about history, but made within it. Yet as cinema, it’s dramatically inert. With no traditional plot, minimal character development, and dialogue that leans toward procedural exposition, it feels closer to a training film than a narrative feature. The performances (many by non-actors) are authentic but flat, and the pacing meanders through long stretches of watchful waiting punctuated by brief bursts of chaos. There’s poetry in its restraint, yes, but also tedium. It captures the quiet heroism of ordinary people under fire, yet rarely stirs the emotions it so clearly respects. An important, quietly compelling time capsule that earns admiration more than enjoyment. Neither good nor bad in the conventional sense, it's simply a sober, unvarnished record of resilience. Watch it for historical insight, not entertainment; appreciate it as testimony, not storytelling.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1943 | Watched: 2026-04-09
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 1940s: Louisiana Story (1948) · The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Men Without Wings (1946) · The Bank Dick (1940)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More war: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · The General (1926) · Men Without Wings (1946) · When the Wind Blows (1986)
