everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

This short drama inspired Porter's "The Great Train Robbery" as also did Haggar's "Desperate Poaching Affray." Of the two films, this one is probably better as there is generally more action and it is more involved. It must have been successful when first released.It is easy to see how this inspired Porter's masterpiece. There are several similarities. For one thing, Porter's idea for the fireman to be hurled off the engine obviously came from the part in here where the thief hurls the policeman off the roof. Additionally, it also includes the getaway by train which is not only reminiscent of "The Great Train Robbery", but also of "The Bold Bank Robbery" which was made by Lubin a year later, I believe. Other than this, it is pretty much the typical "thieves try to rob and later get caught" scenario, with a few elaborations.Thus, this film was more of an inspiration than "Desperate Poaching Affray" was. For the time it's pretty impressive with some nice scenery and photography.

Historian Barry Salt makes some fine points on this one; its fluidity of shots to create exciting action surely do owe much to James Williamson's films, including "Stop Thief!" and "Fire!" (both 1901). In turn, "A Daring Daylight Burglary", in addition to similar British crime chases at the time, such as "A Desperate Poaching Affray", had a significant influence on Edwin S. Porter's "The Great Train Robbery" (1903). British filmmakers, like Robert W. Paul, George Albert Smith, James Williamson and the fellows who made this film, were at the forefront of inventing film techniques and grammar in the beginning of cinema's history.Perhaps, the earliest crime chase was the aforementioned "Stop Thief!" Comparing it to these later incarnations illustrates what the genre did in establishing continuity editing and other film techniques. "Stop Thief!" breaks the rule the axis of action of direction across the screen (a rule not yet invented): when characters exit the frame to the right, for example, in one shot, they enter the next shot at the right, rather than from the left. Williamson may have been imitating the grammar of theatre here, since there was no precedent in cinema. In subsequent films, including the 10-shot "A Daring Daylight Burglary", however, action is continuous by association of shots through continuity editing.The thread from "Fire!" to this film and then to "The Great Train Robbery", with other films in between, is also demonstrated in their "operational aesthetic" (as historian Neil Harris phrased it). Like "The Great Train Robbery", this film presents the violent actions in a straightforward and distant manner because of the aesthetic of showing the details, the operations, of the events. The same sort of curiosity was at work in "Fire!", where the operations of firemen are shown in detail. Thus, we have to see exactly how the injured policeman is taken away before the film resumes with the chase. Two other particular similarities between this film and "The Great Train Robbery" are that they both feature an escape by train, and in a fight scene in each, a substitution splice is used for the tossing of an obvious dummy.

This early British film from the Sheffield Photographic company was one of two films that heavily influenced Edwin S. Porter when making The Great Train Robbery - a film which is erroneously credited with creating the narrative film. This film - at five minutes, quite long for its day - depicts, well, a daring daylight robbery, which is witnessed by a conscientious young boy who races to a nearby police station to raise the alarm. The film then follows the police's pursuit of the burglar over rooftops, down hillsides and across rivers, and it all makes for quite an exciting spectacle. I have to say the British were leading the way in the early years of the 20th century when it came to film production. While Edison and Vitagraph were shooting street scenes ad-nauseum, the Brits were coming up with action-packed blockbusters like this.

This is probably my favourite of the early cinema classics, an exciting action narrative that inspired Edwin S. Porter in making his masterpiece, 'The Great Train Robbery'. The title says everything you need to know about the plot - a man tries to burgle a country house in the middle of the day; the police are roused and chase is given. this is brilliantly done in terms of editing, with some excellent chases and fistfights. But what makes 'Burglary' special is the manner of its filming, which manages to give its genre mechanics a Surrealist quality that would later flourish with Feuillade's 'Fantomas'. The robbery takes place in a real, rather than a stylised environment. Many crime films try, of course, to be gritty and realistic, set in genuine locales, but end up seeming less so because genre and its rules are not like life. This film doesn't try to adapt its genre to its setting, creating an eerie clash. What's more, although the setting is real, it's not common, but a run-down country-house, overgrown with brambles, dead branches and the like, contributing to the rarefied atmosphere. Add to this the purity of the plot, shorn of bogus 'psychologising' and extraneous plotting, just criminal and police, and you already see the bones of what would become Feuillade's unheimliche cinema.This would be more than enough, but than something really extraordinary happens. In the middle of the chase, a policeman is knocked over as he climbs over a large wall in a deserted country lane. Obviously, there are a couple of frames missing, because magically carriages appear, out of nowhere, like something out of Sjostrom's 'Phantom Carriage'. What's more, most of the traffic ignore the stricken lawman! So, here is a film where generic grounding and certainties are pushed towards surrealism, fantasy, absurdity, eight years before 'Fantomas' the novel was ever written. A masterpiece.