michfaldo I will have to order this movie to give a proper review... I have not watched it but plan on ordering it and coming back to hopefully give a full review about it! I'm glad it's on IMDb. My mother told me she was an extra in this when production went to Trinidad to film. She, along with friends were all 'background/extra's.' She told me all the young ladies became fascinated with the movie business and wanted to become actresses after being in the background! So ironic... I'm in the business and have been for a few years now, started as an extra and also work on the production side of things... guess show biz is meant to be in the family! According to the reviews, seems like it's a good 'ole Classic!

James Hitchcock Two American sailors, Felix and Tony, are co-owners of a tramp boat which they use for small-scale smuggling around the Caribbean. One day, however, they receive a more lucrative proposition. They are offered $1000 to transport Irena, a beautiful but stateless Eastern European refugee, from one island to another. As normally happens in films like this, both men fall in love with her, and they come to blows, their friendship forgotten.The two men are quite different in character. Tony, a bachelor, is a romantic and idealistic young man who has come to care deeply for Irena. Felix is a divorcée, several years older than Tony; the failure of his brief marriage has left him a hard-bitten and cynical misogynist. He also has a nasty streak in him, shown when, under a pretence of friendship, he tells Tony to beware of Irena who is a woman of immoral character. His real motive, of course, is to leave Irena free for himself. When this ploy fails, he tips off the coastguard about Tony's smuggling activities.The first part of the film is dominated by the Tony/Felix/Irena love triangle, but about halfway through Felix and Irena suddenly disappear from the action and the film abruptly changes from a romantic melodrama to a disaster movie, a sort of poor man's "Poseidon Adventure". Tony has signed as a crewman on board a Greek freighter and is injured when it is involved in a collision with a liner. Tony's injuries are in themselves relatively minor, certainly not life-threatening, but he is nevertheless in grave danger as he is trapped by a fallen iron girder and the ship is on fire. To make things worse, it is carrying a potentially explosive cargo.This was Rita Hayworth's first film after a four-year absence from the screen, caused by events in her private life. Rita remained a major sex symbol for over two decades because she was able to change her style of beauty as she got older. In early films such as "You'll Never Get Rich" she was an innocent, girl-next-door type. In what might be called her "middle period", the period of "Gilda" or "The Lady from Shanghai" she was a seductive femme fatale. Here, at the age of 39, she plays a glamorous, sophisticated older woman, and still looks as attractive as ever, especially in a swimsuit.This is, moreover, a very accomplished acting performance. Irena seems to have had a somewhat shady past, the full details of which are never made clear in the film, but one does not sense from Rita's interpretation that she is as immoral as Felix makes out. There is a sense that Irena has had a difficult life in Europe and that she has known sadness, perhaps even tragedy. She is reserved on the surface but one senses strong feelings beneath. (This is one of two meanings of the title "Fire down Below", the other referring to the literal fire which has broken out on the ship).Jack Lemmon as Tony plays his part reasonably well, but this is not a particularly good film. There are several reasons for this. The race against time to free Tony from the burning ship does not generate as much tension as one might have expected. The two halves of the film do not fit together well, and the change from one to the other is too abrupt. Irena and Felix reappear towards the end, but only Robert Mitchum has much to do; Rita's participation is effectively over by half-time.Felix is a key character, but Mitchum hesitates between two possible interpretations of the role. He seems unsure whether Felix is basically a decent but flawed individual or basically a nasty piece of work who redeems himself by one act of selfless bravery. He attempts both interpretations in the course of the film, and ends up making neither convincing. The film-makers were obviously guided by the normal convention that in any film involving a love-triangle it will be the first name above the title who gets the girl. (Lemmon was later to become one of Hollywood's biggest names, but in 1957 it was Mitchum who got first billing). The ending, in which Irena ends up with Felix rather than Tony, struck me as psychologically implausible and dramatically false. A marriage between Irena and Tony might have had some chance of working; one between her and Felix would serve no purpose except to provide employment for the divorce lawyers. Despite its three major-league stars, "Fire Down Below" is no more than a minor-league melodrama. 5/10

arieliondotcom 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.

Gordon Cheatham (cheathamg) 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.