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From the moment Shelly Forsythe, the firefighter, arrived at the firehouse, it was pure mayhem. As if the chaos wasn’t enough, he was aware of the fact that he had taken up the position of a relatively more popular firefighter who was dead now. He wasn’t the first retiring firefighter in the setting and he definitely wouldn’t be the last. To add to the chaos, he was the first black firefighter in that firehouse. Other firemen, led by the angry racist Skip Ryerson, had a extremely high level of mistrust in Forsythe and that led to him experiencing overly unnecessary rough treatment. But on the other end, Forsythe held his ground and was adamant on proving that he was of equal caliber as any other white firefighter. While there was rigidity and simmering racial tension within the firehouse, a group of fire starters was on the loose setting buildings on fire.
The plot of Firehouse is almost non existent, but for the little that exists, it tries to wrap it up within the seventy two minutes of runtime. It is Forsythe’s first day on the job and during which, he is a victim of all sorts of bullying. He loses his temper, and just like that, there is a fire which has to be attended to. In the ensuing events, nothing is truly resolved in the end. Ryerson continues to be a racist and Forsythe still holds resentment against most of the firehouse staff. The head of the firehouse, like most of the characters is one dimensional. And almost every action sequence of the fire rescue has been pulled out from a blurry stock recording. Nonetheless, a definite topic of interest, is how the film deals with the hidden cons of racism that exist in the attitudes of white members of a society. It is evident for example, in Ryerson whose character borderlines between racism and prejudice, that the movie tries to portray him unrepentant. Though, on second thought, it is that easy (and not that complicated) to assume that to understand him, one simply needs to patiently wait. For the intro of Andrew Duggan, whose fire chief, when asked why Forsythe should never listen to the couple of races insults fired constantly, firehouse tries to suggest that Duggan is offering sensible advice which he is. This way of thinking was characteristic for 1973, but we all know for a fact that even as of today, it does not work.
One reason why so many viewers found the ending of Firehouse a bit abrupt is that Firehouse was a pilot for a tv series. When Firehouse was first aired, it was only two years since Roundtree had starred as John Shaft, and so it was NBC’s target to recapture that magic on weekly basis. The plan, however, was to start production for the Firehouse TV series after a year, which had Roundtree leave the project. In fact, with the exception of Richard Jaeckel, no one who appeared in the pilot went on to appear in the short-lived TV series.
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