There was a movie I watched back in high school, in which a white man got trapped in a fire and couldn’t get out-- but somehow, he was still able to call out to people. He asks his son to shoot him so that he doesn’t have to suffer the pain of burning to death, but the son is reticent.
A nearby black man has no such restraint, though, and he shoots and kills the white man who was in the fire. Naturally, there were other white people nearby to immediately try to punish the black man for shooting and killing the white man. (Rule of Acquisition #285: No good deed ever goes unpunished.)
It’s really weird, this thread is giving me major de-ja-vu even though I can’t definitively say whether I’ve actually seen the movie in question. I can picture it in my mind’s eye. I wish I knew the answer.
I remember seeing a movie about the British Raj. An Indian widow was going to be burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre (this was a tradition called suti) and a British soldier shot her from a distance so she wouldn’t suffer being burned alive. (The Brit might have been the lover of the Indian woman; I can’t remember.)
This sort of scene is so familiar it is probably a movie trope.
In The Last of the Mohicans the woman Cora is sentenced to be burned alive, but Major Heyward takes her place. When Hawkeye, the women and a couple others get far enough away Hawkeye shoots the Major to end his suffering.
It is. I looked there earlier but couldn’t find anything that seemed to match. (The first one that comes to mind to me–Comic Book Villains--wasn’t there either.)
I recall a scene in “The Great Waldo Pepper” with a guy trapped in the burning wreckage of a plane and Waldo tried but failed to free him. He may have whacked him with a wrench or something, not sure.