Hellfighters

United States

1968

121 Min

Color

2.20:1

English, Spanish

Currently 2.6/5 Stars.
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CAST John Wayne, Katharine Ross, Jim Hutton, Vera Miles, Jay C. Flippen, Bruce Cabot, Edward Faulkner, Barbara Stuart, Edmund Hashim, Valentin de Vargas, Frances Fong, Alberto Morin, Alan Caillou

PROD DES Frank Arrigo, Alexander Golitzen

Chance Buckman (John Wayne) owns a Houston company which puts out oil well fires all over the world. Greg Parker (Jim Hutton) is his loyal young playboyish assistant. The men are on 24-hour call. The film opens on New Year’s Day and Chance is called by his secretary Irene to return from a gambling holiday to the Bahamas while he’s in mid-flight, Greg is tracked down in the boudoir with a hot Hispanic broad outside the country. They are asked to fight an oil well fire in Texas. Within seconds we learn that their job is dangerous and soon learn they both have problems communicating with women. The marriage between Chance and Madelyn (Vera Miles) sours when she can no longer face saying goodbye to him without fearing she will never see him again. Greg will turn over a new leaf as a domestically tamed man when he marries Chance’s daughter, Tish (Katherine Ross), who insists on coming along to all the fires even though she shares her mother’s concern over the job being a dangerous one. —Ozu’s World of Movie Reviews

Director

Andrew V. McLaglen

Andrew Victor McLaglen (born 28 July 1920) is a British-American film and television director and former actor.

Andrew McLaglen was born in London, the son of British actor Victor McLaglen and Enid Lamont. He was from a film family that included eight uncles and an aunt, and he grew up on movie sets with his parents as well as John Wayne and John Ford. After working as an assistant director on a few smaller films, Ford gave him the assistant director job on the film The Quiet Man (1952).

After a few more assistant or second director jobs, McLaglen directed his first film Gun The Man Down in 1956 – a western B-movie with James Arness, Angie Dickinson and Harry Carey, Jr..

He went on to work extensively in television directing, directing episodes of Perry Mason (7), Gunslinger (5), Rawhide (6), and then 99 episodes of Have Gun – Will Travel, The Lieutenant (4), The Virginian (2), and 96 episodes of Gunsmoke.

Returning to films – directing Shenandoah (1965… read more