On Location: The Hellfighters (Downtown Houston) Houston, Texas, United States
By Great Birds on 23-May-10. Waypoint GA2240

Boy Meets Girl and They Have a Fight
Greg hops into the company jet and takes off for Jackson Hole, where Tish is staying in her vacation home. These are no ordinary firefighters, you see, these are Hellfighters, men who extinguish burning oil wells. Tish reluctantly agrees to come to Houston and shows little emotion for her gravely injured father. At the same time, Greg is feeling the situation acutely, and lashes out at Tish for her lack of feeling. At this point everyone who has read Pride and Prejudice knows that Greg and Tish will get married, it is just a matter of how they will overcome their initial dislike for each other.

A Family Reunites
They arrive and meet Madelyn, Tish's mother and Chances' former wife. While we are waiting to see if Chance will live, (like anyone could kill off John Wayne in a movie) we learn that Madelyn still loves Chance. In the back story it turns out after Tish's birth, Madelyn decided she could not live with the dangers inherent in wild well firefighting, the exact risks that Chance thrives on. They agreed to a divorce and Madelyn raised Tish on her own, explaining Chance's crusty behavior.

Love as Hot as a Wild Well Fire
Chance and Madelyn have never really moved on from their divorce and are still in love. Since this is John Wayne, you know he will get his girl. It also turns out that Greg is pretty much like Chance, thriving on risk and adventure while Tish is like her mother and attracted to just that kind of man. Showing the same impulsiveness as her parents, Tish and Greg marry as quickly as they can get Chance out of the hospital. Can they live happily ever after? Can Tish avoid the worry and loneliness that drove her parents apart? More importantly, does the audience really care?

Things Can Only Get Worse
Unfortunately by this time no one really does care. Tish's main job from this point is to follow her husband to unconvincingly filmed "exotic" and dangerous locations with nothing better to do than stand around, look uncomfortable and try to stay out of the way while the men tell her she should be at home. Then as if to prove a point, the Communist guerrillas attack on queue.

Poor Katherine Ross, after sparkling as Elaine Robinson in The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, she is dumped into this preposterous role opposite the dull Jim Hutton. The Hellfighters embodies what The Graduate had so successfully satirized just one year before.

The container is a magnetic key holder placed on a busy downtown street. The spot is near the the building that hosted board meetings for an oil company featured in the film. That building is a few blocks west at 550 Jefferson but this intersection provided a better view. From this location, if you cross Louisiana Street and look north east up the street, you will see two of the building that were prominently visible from the board room. The easy to recognize Humble Oil building (now ExxonMobil) is partly obscured to your right. Several blocks up Louisiana to Polk Street is the mostly obscured former Sheraton Lincoln Hotel. The old building is not much to see as it has been abandoned for years. Not really visible from behind the old Sheraton is the Tenneco (El Paso) building. Both the ExxonMobil and El Paso buildings house the successors to the companies resident there when The Hellfighters was made in 1968.