Divorced Chance Buckman fights international oil rig fires. An injury brings his daughter and to his dismay, she weds Greg, a team member. Chance gets a desk-job, so he and Madelyn remarry, ... Read allDivorced Chance Buckman fights international oil rig fires. An injury brings his daughter and to his dismay, she weds Greg, a team member. Chance gets a desk-job, so he and Madelyn remarry, but a Venezuelan oil rig fire reunites them.Divorced Chance Buckman fights international oil rig fires. An injury brings his daughter and to his dismay, she weds Greg, a team member. Chance gets a desk-job, so he and Madelyn remarry, but a Venezuelan oil rig fire reunites them.
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Featured reviews
This isn't awful, and the firefighting scenes are interesting, but the melodrama aspects are tired and dull. I always like seeing Jay C. Flippen, even if this is one of his wheelchair roles after losing a leg to diabetes complications. Ross reportedly battled with Wayne throughout filming due to their contrasting views on Vietnam.
I really liked this movie. I thought Chance Buckman was the perfect role for John Wayne's character...his character seemed to match the sort of person who would be doing this for a living. Fighting the fires while getting shot at by guerrilla fighters seemed a big much, until I considered what is going on with people working on the infrastructure in Iraq...not much different.
I've heard the complaint that the special effects are not up to today's standards, but they work for me...they do not interrupt my suspension of disbelief, and they are not distracting like some of todays whiz-bang special effects.
I think this is one of John Wayne's best movies.
This movie was so visually stunning that Popular Mechanics ran a cover story on the special effects, describing how a mixture of propane and diesel oil was used to make the fires, which were fed by underground pipes. It also explained that Red Adair really did use explosives to put out oil well fires, which many people found hard to believe.
This was a highly believable, present day performance by John Wayne, which is somewhat special in and of itself. There was only one brawl, which was all good fun, and we even get to see Mr. Wayne get a face full of what looks kind of like oil. (It was dyed water.) There is no heavy, moralistic message to this film, a minimum of flag waving, and watching it is just plain fun.
Did you know
- TriviaJay C. Flippen had a leg amputated due to infection in 1965 while filming Cat Ballou (1965). That is why he played Jack Lomax as being wheelchair bound, with the reason given that the character had broken his back fighting a fire.
- GoofsThe Australian driller takes off his mask a decent distance away from the poison well fire and dies nearly instantly. Yet Greg is right under the well and has a hole in his hose going directly into the closed environment of his mask and is only knocked out. However, this can be explained by the Australian breathing air that had been saturated with the poison gas. The gas was spreading past the safety flags, possible due to wind or other weather conditions. Greg was working with an air mask. When his hose split he still had some air left in his tank that would have been at a higher pressure than the outside air, keeping it out of his breathing air to a degree. He is seen putting his hand over the leak and then passing out in the water. The water would have prevented further poisonous air from getting into his system.
- Quotes
Chance Buckman: Exactly WHAT did you tell her about Madame Loo?
Greg Parker: Only that she's 80 years old, weighs 300 pounds and is one of your oldest friends.
- Crazy creditsThere is a print which has been shown on UK television, an original English language print with English titles, which however includes two frames of opening titles in Italian: the list of technical consultants is headed "Consulenti Tecnici" and the next sheet explaining that the events depicted are based on the real live experiences of those people, is written in Italian. Then the credits revert to English.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Les Soprano: Walk Like a Man (2007)
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Details
Box office
- Budget
- $6,000,000 (estimated)
- Runtime2 hours 1 minute
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 2.35 : 1