Fire Down Below

Great film of Robert mitchum, one i had not seen before. Thank you for your service. Dvd arrived on time. I have gave you a 5 star.

im too young to know much about this film, but my dad really wanted it, so it made his day when i finally tracked a copy down and got it for him. apparently its a classic!!!

good old 1950s colour motion picture with well known stars. look out for the model ships

Excellent

Saw it in 1961 when I was abroad with the RAF. Liked it so much I saw it again the next night. Well, I was very young. Jerry Southern sang the title song and I now have a fairly large collection of her records.

Great cast, great premise, great cinematography but botched construction, (but this could have been fault of studio rather than the actual director, Robert Parrish), and possibly, to Region 2 viewers, a lost gem.Had the whole movie script been constructed in flashbacks: from Mitchum's, Lemmon's and Jimmy's, (sorry can't recall actor's name), perspectives about Rita's character and impact on their lives, it could have been great. As it is, its a fond memory I first saw as a little kid...but its always stuck in my mind. Looking at it now I reckon its got some of Rita's best acting, (along side Seperate Tables, They Came to Cordura and her lighter but equally effective performance in Pal Joey). Unfortunately the movie's construction is very flawed and allows Rita's character, the driver of the plot, to drop out in second half...but to compensate.... she does have great presence in the last scene.

Nothing to do with Steven Seagal, 1957's Fire Down Below can be seen either as a typical Hollywood romantic triangle (although it's actually a British film) or, for the more trivia minded, as a footnote to the Bond films, with co-producer Albert R. Broccoli assembling various Bond team members five years before the event - the first M (Bernard Lee) and Blofeld (Eric Pholmann) in front of the cameras, production designer Syd Cain and special effects man Cliff Richardson behind them. The story is pretty simple: Robert Mitchum and Jack Lemmon eke out a precarious and less than legal living in Trinidad by ferrying tourists or the odd consignment of contraband in their rundown boat until one day their cargo - in this case displaced person Rita Hayworth, always one port ahead of a warrant - comes between them. Things reach a head when Lemmon finds himself trapped in the cargo hulk of a burning ship while Bernard Lee, Herbert Lom and Bonar Colleano try to free him before they're forced to abandon the ship in deep waters to avoid the entire harbor being destroyed.While the first half of the film ambles along pleasantly enough, it's this section that really grips (and spectacularly eats up most of the budget), even though Mitch and Rita disappear for nearly 40 minutes while all this is going on. In fact, Hayworth all but disappears from the second half of the film entirely, having little to do once Lemmon decides to make an ill-fated smuggling run and making surprisingly little impact doing it, though it is your only chance to see her calypso dance with Tutte Lemkow! (Incidentally, it was while in Trinidad for this film that Mitchum was inspired to record one of the greatest albums of all time, Calypso is Like So: if you don't have it in your collection, you need to! Not to be outdone, Jack Lemmon is credited as one of the film's composers for his harmonica themes...)There are few surprises (though Anthony Newley underplaying his part to pleasing effect is certainly one of them), but despite some clumsy editing in the early scenes it's enjoyable formulaic studio fair with a particularly nice use of old-fashioned CinemaScope, and Columbia's Region 1 NTSC widescreen DVD 2.55:1 has one of the best transfers I've seen from a 50s film. No extras other than trailers for Lady From Shanghai, Gilda and They Came to Cordura.

Good video