Fire Down Below (1957)

Wonderful Movie

Sorry, this movie sucks

Great Film overall

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

No-one would ever accuse "Fire Down Below" of being a good film but photographed in Cinemascope and Technicolour on location in the Caribbean it's certainly a handsome one, Throw in Robert Mitchum, Rita Hayworth and Jack Lemmon and it becomes a film with star quality as well. The plot is as old as the hills as pals Mitchum and Lemmon fall out over Hayworth, the woman they are transporting 'from nowhere to nowhere'. The film generates a little excitement, (though not much), when Lemmon gets trapped in a ship that is about to blow up. The terrible dialogue is courtesy of Irwin Shaw from a book by Max Catto and director Robert Parrish was hardly the man to turn a pig's ear into a silk purse.

Executive producers: Irving Allen and Albert R. Broccoli. Produced on location in the British West Indies and at M-G-M Studios, Elstree, England. A Warwick Production. A Columbia Picture.Copyright 1957 by Warwick Productions. New York opening at the Astor: 8 August 1957. U.S. release: July 1957. U.K. release: 28 July 1957. Australian release: 26 September 1957. Sydney opening at the State. 10,294 feet. 114 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Mitchum and Lemmon are Felix and Tony (the original odd couple), a pair of vagabond, minor-league smugglers, knocking about the West Indies in their small boat. The two are approached by Irena (Hayworth), a stateless lady who is anxious for transport to the vague island of Santa Nada where passports are less important. En route, the less-than-worldly Tony falls for her, while the bored Felix tries to save his partner from the wiles of their sultry passenger. ("I'm no good for you. No good for anyone. Armies have marched over me," she confesses to Tony in one of the story's more notable bits of dialogue).COMMENT: Dull in 1957, and just as dull all these years later. Admittedly, the film comes to a bit more life in its last half hour, when the support cast finally do their duty. Peter Illing is especially effective as the captain. But the direction remains slack throughout, aside from two effective shots of Hayworth in farewell, the first as she steps ashore in Santa Nada, the second as she waves to Lemmon on his twilit boat.The script by Irwin Shaw is a surprising bore. Maybe it would have been better told in flashback with Lemmon on the tub flashing back to Anthony Newley (a small part at the start as a venal waiter, but still one of the better things in the film).Hayworth is none too flatteringly photographed at times, though her fans are indulged with plenty of close-ups. But she and Mitchum virtually disappear from the only exciting part of the film. The rest is boringly tricked out and lengthened by inconsequential limbo and mardi gras sequences which were better left on the editor's floor.No great use is made of CinemaScope either, despite its prominence in the film's advertising. The compositions are so loose, the film fits easily on to a standard TV. Still, Rita swims and dances and I suppose that is what the fans want. I didn't see any similarity between her life and "Barefoot Contessa" and neither did fans. The film did moderate business at most, mainly on the strength of ads which promised a star combination and story excitement which the film failed to deliver.A co-production of Great Britain's Warwick Films and Columbia Pictures, made on location in Trinidad, "Fire Down Below" was Rita Hayworth's return-to-the-screen after a four-year absence.

There are more fumes than fire in this film. And some of those fumes are downright stinky. Rita Hayworth's performance is silly to the point of being laughable. She barely mumbles her way through in what I've got to assume is supposed to be a sexy voice but comes across as a parody of herself as the female lead in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?Jack Lemmon, spoiled playboy son of a wealthy man befriends vagobond loser Mitchum and both wind up with fading femme fatale Hayworth in a romp in a boat. A large part of the problem of the movie is that it can't decide what it wants to be. It starts out as what seems to be a lighthearted musical (which captured my interest considering I'd never seen any of these three leads in a musical). But then the road suddenly dips into adventure, then suddenly turns into sultry love story, then adventure, then drama then...Well, frankly I lost count...then suddenly you're thrown against a wall as it comes to a sudden stop. But none of these bends in the road were done well. They should have stuck to the music because that was the most memorable part.Jack Lemmon made the movie and it might be worth watching for him alone. But otherwise it is a dull flicker of what should have been a fiery film.

It's interesting that the things that make this film weak would have made it great if only it had been made in the late forties or early fifties and had been made in black and white. The setting is some exotic never-never land where life is cheap and morality is a rare and expensive commodity somewhere in the Caribbean. The acting is stylized. The characterizations are two-dimensional. The story is one of an overheated romance and acts of heroism involving people who are not worthy of respect except that ultimately they do the right thing. Rita Hayworth is a bad girl with a heart of gold, a faded version of Gilda. Robert Mitchum is doing his usual Robert Mitchum imitation, i.e. he's just too tired and bored to give the really good performance of which he was capable. Jack Lemmon is the idealist romantic who is willing to lay everything on the line and winds up learning a bitter lesson about people. As I said earlier, if only this film had been made earlier and in black and white it would have been an archetypal example of film noir. Personally, I like film noir but the genre was highly stylized and too often the actors were required to strike poses rather than develop the personalities of the parts they were playing. Unfortunately this film was made too late to be considered a part of that form and therefore deserves scorn instead of being lauded in Saturday afternoon showings at Parisian film societies.