Trailer
Plot summary
Chance Buckman runs a Houston oil-well firefighting company. Joe Horn, Greg Parker and George Harris work on his crew, and they travel to well heads around the world to put out blazes set off by accidents, explosions or attacks. Chance enjoys the thrill of the work, but what he wants is his ex-wife Madelyn, who divorced him twenty years earlier and left with their daughter Letitia. Madelyn still loves him, yet she cannot stand the fear that he will be badly hurt or burn to death on a job. Greg, for his part, has a reputation for bringing women along to fires.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hellfighters (1968)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- This was the first film for which Wayne was paid $1 million, and unlike many of his films around that time it was not made for his own company.
- The movie depicts a group of oil well firefighters and is based loosely on the life of Red Adair, who served as a technical adviser along with "Boots" Hansen and "Coots" Matthews.
- Red Adair had been fighting fires since 1946 and was well known in the industry, but became more generally known in 1962 after extinguishing the Devil's Cigarette Lighter Sahara gas well fire.
- Much of the filming took place on the Snodgrass Ranch just outside Casper, Wyoming, where a catering truck crashed into Wayne's trailer while the star was inside it; he was not injured.
- Vera Miles played Katharine Ross's mother in the film, even though in real life Miles was only nine years older than Ross.
- It reteamed Wayne with Andrew McLaglen, with whom he had made McLintock! in 1963, and with Jim Hutton, who had been in The Green Berets.
