Not all of John Wayne’s contemporary dramas stand up to the passage of time, but I revisit Hellfighters (1968), his oil well-firefighting movie, every few years because it does.  Hellfiighters is a fictionalized version of real-life fire-fighter “Red” Adair’s adventures around the globe with his crew extinguishing the oil well fires nobody else wanted to handle.  If you haven’t heard of Adair, who died in 2004, you should spend the time to research his exploits; the man was a genius at his profession — which is why John Wayne starred in a movie about him.

Adair and his top-level lieutenants served as technical advisors on the film, and each of the film’s four oil well fire sequences are based on experiences they had.  Each fire is different, involving various complications such as poison gas or rebel snipers trying to re-ignite the fires and stop the crews from capping the wells.  And while the special effects may not resemble modern computer-generated work, it should be noted that Andrew V. McLaglen and his film crew worked with real fire in all of these scenes (if not real oil, nitroglycerin or bullets).  The result is a film that is visually spectacular and quite exciting.

Even the domestic drama works pretty well.  Wayne has an accident, so his estranged grown daughter (Katharine Ross) is summoned.  She falls for Wayne’s foreman, Jim Hutton, and before Wayne knows it she is a part of his life.  Eventually her mother, Wayne’s ex-wife (Vera Miles), also re-establishes contact, too.  Ross’s character is stubborn and bold, just like her father, and it doesn’t matter that we never know what her life was before being brought back into the fold.  All that matters is that she can stand the heat, and, thus, can stand by her men.

That’s what the movie is about.  Being able to withstand the psychological torture of the danger that permeates the job and that threatens everyone who fights the fires.  Miles couldn’t handle it, which is why she left Big John in the first place.  But in the red-hot world of Hellfighters, where the company motto is “Around the World, Around the Clock,” it’s a good bet that she will get another chance.  My rating:  ☆ ☆ ☆.

(10:1).