Looking over the list of late career movies with John Wayne, this is probably one of the worst. As Wayne got older and westerns were declining, he would occasionally look for more contemporary subjects to appear in.
This worthless movie about firefighters putting out spectacular oil rig fires probably seemed like a good one at first, but the screenplay was just terrible. The story is a mix of fire sequences followed by some lame soap opera stuff about Wayne's domestic life. The audience endures lots and lots of "honey don't go and put out that oil well fire tonight, I'm worried you might get hurt" scenes. This stuff is just murder to sit through. It looks like Wayne was trying to make a Howard Hawk's type of film with action and drama mixed together.
Frankly, even the fire fighting highlights are boring after a while, if you've seen one oil rig go up in flames you've seen them all. The settings don't help, the film is supposed to be about Wayne's team flying all over the world putting out fires, but every scene was clearly shot at Universal Studios.
By this point in his career Wayne should have been able to tell a good script from a bad script, but he has only himself to blame, the film was made by his production company. This film is the one that Katherine Ross made after The Graduate and it's certainly a contrast between the old Hollywood and New Hollywood film making styles.
Probably the only interesting thing about the film is the appearance of Bruce Cabot, Wayne's boozing buddy. Apparently a hard living kind of guy, Cabot was the star of the original King Kong with Fay Wray. His final film appearance was in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever.
Wayne's next film was True Grit.
Written by Clair Huffaker, the running time is 121 minutes.
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