The Fire Raisers – 1933 | 71mins | Thriller | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Fire assessor Jim Bronson uses unscrupulous tactics to build his own business. When he loses it all at the gambling table he joins a group of arsonists but later helps the police to round them up. Though this film is by no means a continuous blaze, its fires are certainly worth seeing, Francis Sullivan plays the part of the chief villain with real imagination, the road to ruin is described with some plausibility and not without some entertainment on the way.

With nine releases in the previous two years, Michael Powell surprisingly made only one film during 1933. The Fire Raisers was the first production in a four-picture deal between Powell/Jackson and Gaumont-British. Not a ‘quota quickie’, The Fire Raisers, at Powell’s estimation, cost around £12,000 to produce and featured a much stronger cast than the director had previously had at his command led by West End star Leslie Banks, just back from a starring role in RKO’s The Most Dangerous Game (Hounds of Zaroff) in Hollywood. ‘It was the first time that I had worked with a great actor’, Powell later wrote. An original screenplay, described by Powell as ‘a sort of Warner Brothers Newspaper Headline Story’, The Fire Raisers was a success attracting considerable and favourable attention from critics who remarked that ‘Michael Powell has economical ideas on continuity that save his producers hundreds of pounds a week’, although they felt he had yet to prove he can think big. A nitrate print of The Fire Raisers was among those films rescued from the Pinewood Studio vaults in early, 1990.