Les feux de l'enfer

Action and romance with John Wayne as the head of a company that specializes in putting out oil well fires. An accident leads to his co-worker and friend Jim Hutton contacting Wayne's estranged daughter Katharine Ross and ex-wife Vera Miles, who left Wayne because she couldn't handle the stress of being married to a man in such a dangerous profession. Wayne and Miles are therefore stunned when Hutton and Ross fall for each other and quickly get married, insuring that the younger couple will face the same situations.

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.

This is a very entertaining film ... co-staring Jim Hutton, Katherine Ross & Vera Miles. Some of the acting of Hutton & Ross may have been less than one would expect. But the film should be seen keeping mind that this was years before the disaster films of the early seventies like The Poseidon Adventure & The Towering Inferno. It is a fun watch as Buckman's crew travels the world putting out oil well fires while kindling a few fires of their own in the local women. It is fun to watch many of the fire-fighting scenes today and wonder how they pulled this off thirty years ago. It is very John Wayne as can be seen as some of his regulars turn up here, such as Bruce Cabot, Edward Faulkner who were part of his stable. Watch it and enjoy.

Loosely based on the exploits of Red Adair, Hellfighters is a perfect vehicle for John Wayne. The characterizations are a bit overstated, but this was standard for the era, so I allow for that. And who could have picked a more appropriate love interest for the Duke than Vera Miles as a San Francisco Department Store heiress.

I thought Jim Hutton and Katherine Ross made a good offsetting couple to JW & VM and Bruce Cabot, a long-time associate of Wayne's, an excellent comic element.

I think the thing that sold it for me was the reality of the fire scenes which I just marveled at until I saw that Red Adair was a technical adviser on the film. That and the knowledge that Wayne was all for reality as much as possible really made me a watch it anytime fan of this picture.

If one takes into account the decade in which the picture was made, it can be and is, for me at least, a very enjoyable film. I highly recommend it!

Sandwiched in between the critical beating John Wayne took for The Green Berets and a bunch of westerns culminating in his Oscar performance for True Grit is this little known film he did about a group of men fighting oil fires, a truly dangerous profession. The Hellfighters has the look and feel of a Wayne family effort with it being produced by Batjac and having in its cast Wayne regulars like Edward Faulkner and Bruce Cabot. I wonder where son Patrick was.

A little over 20 years after Hellfighters came out, the person that Wayne's character was based on, Red Adair came into prominence when he took on the Herculean task of putting out all those oil fires that Saddam Hussein started in Kuwait when he fled that country. Turns out the biggest assignment Adair had was way in his future in 1968.

I'm sure Red Adair must have been flattered all to heck when the biggest box office draw in cinema history was portraying a facsimile of him on the screen. Who knows though maybe Red Adair's real story and real name on the screen might be good entertainment. Might be a great subject for a film now, what with all the new computer generated special effects that could be used.

Though the film is based on Adair's exploits, it is first and foremost a John Wayne film. He's not Red Adair on the screen, it's the Duke that all of us have come to know. Wayne and his cast put together a nice action filled film with a minor subplot about his family life. Vera Miles plays his estranged wife, Katharine Ross his daughter, and Jim Hutton a protégé Wayne is grooming to take over his company.

This was Wayne's third film with Vera Miles and twice before he didn't wind up with her, either in The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Third time the charm.

Hellfighters also is an example of Wayne's well known generosity to his fellow players. When he liked you he was the best friend you could have. Jay C. Flippen who plays an oil executive lost a leg to diabetes a year or two before. Wayne gave him that extra pay day by casting him in Hellfighters in a wheelchair. I could cite a lot of other examples of him helping people by doing that in other films.

Hellfighters is an enjoyable two hours of Wayne in modern dress, battling the elements like he did in The High and the Mighty and Island in the Sky instead of bad guys. There is one sequence where he and his crew were battling an oil fire in Venezuela with some rebels shooting at them. Since it's the Duke, you kind of expect him to pick up a rifle and blow them all away.

Though Hellfighters is a good, not a great film, I'd still like to see the real Red Adair story on screen.

When I first saw "Hellfighters" I was only about 13 years old. The movie certainly captivated me, in part because it seemed so realistic. Also, the slogan of the Buckman Company really appealed to me. "Around the world, around the clock." This was a story about someone who really went the distance to help people.

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.