Cinema: Dry Well

Actors these days make reputations by playing junkies, warlocks, maniacs, hippies, fags and dictators. Somehow it is reassuring to know that there’s still an actor left who will play a leathery oil-well firefighter with the unlikely name of Chance Buckman. That’s John Wayne. The Duke may not be too good at rendering Brechtian anguish, but no one else can play a better John Wayne.

In Hellfighters, the Duke dashes around the world blasting out spectacular blazes in other people’s wells. When he isn’t hellfighting, he puzzles out all sorts of complicated personal relationships: Will he get back together with his wife? Will daughter find true happiness with Her Man? Will the womenfolk ever resign themselves to their menfolk’s dangerous pursuits?

Director Andrew V. McLaglen seems to have made the movie while his mind was on something else—probably quitting time. Katharine Ross, Dustin Hoffman’s sidekick in The Graduate, plays Duke’s daughter with an understandable lack of enthusiam. A few more parts like this and she’ll be about as well remembered as Vera Hruba Ralston.