Fuego en sus labios

You can't go wrong seeing a movie with the three stars that are in this one. But the real feature of this film is the location shooting in Trinidad/Tobago. If this doesn't make you want to choose that as your next vacation you are a hopeless stick-in-the-mud.

The song was also a big hit in 1957. It's a great melody and you hear it and you can't get it out of your mind.

Two men whose friendship his tested by a woman they both have the hots for. And when that woman is Rita Hayworth, who can wonder. She's older now, but still incredibly beautiful.

See a great story and appreciate Trinidad, make those vacation plans.

Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum, and Jack Lemmon star in "Fire Down Below," a 1957 film.

Hayworth plays Irena, a woman with a mysterious European past and no passport. Mitchum and Lemmon are Felix and Tony, who run a ferry boat in the Caribbean. They are paid to take Irena to another island.

Felix (Mitchum) knows she's trouble and worse than that, he's attracted to her. Tony (Lemmon) falls for Irena and, when she leaves the ferry, he accompanies her.

The film takes an odd turn here - Tony wants to marry Irena, so he takes a job transporting illegal goods to get some money together. But someone has tipped off the police. Tony and his associate escape, and Tony ends up on a Greek ship. The ship has an accident, and Tony is trapped in the hold.

This film starts out as one thing - a love triangle, a mysterious woman with a checkered past, two friends who become enemies - and becomes the story of a man facing death in the cargo hold of a ship.

That part goes on too long, and we don't see the happenings on dry land. We are told about them toward the end of the film. It just felt like something was missing.

There are suspenseful moments and good acting. Mitchum plays the sardonic Felix well, and Lemmon is, as always, likable as Tony and handles both the light and dramatic scenes very well.

I do think for this role his casting was somewhat strange. I think like Hayworth he was trying to fulfill contractual obligations to Columbia.

Hayworth is a long way from her Gilda days, but a striking woman. Her hard life, like the life of the character, has caught up with her. She doesn't display a lot of range in the role but has a knockout dance number during Mardi Gras that is very much the old Rita.

Interesting for the cast.

This film was quite enjoyable but I think it could have been immeasurably improved if the director and editor had included more scenes between Robert Mitchum and Rita Hayworth. The episode where Jack Lemmon's character is trapped on the ship is far too drawn out. His crisis should've been shortened and they should've actually shown Rita Hayworth turning to Robert Mitchum because they are kindred spirits, instead of just explaining this occurance later on. Mitchum and Hayworth were off-screen far too long. That major complaint aside, I found the film very entertaining. Mitchum is perfect with the weary, cynical, and intense combination. Hayworth has more depth than usual as the mysterious foreign woman. And Lemmon in a rare dramatic turn is very convincing as the naive and lovestruck young man. Here's an interesting tidbit: the film was executive produced by Cubby Broccoli, the long time producer of the Bond movies, and Bernard Lee, who would play M in the Bond films, has a supporting role in Fire Down Below. 7/10.

FIRE DOWN BELOW is watchable for the performances of ROBERT MITCHUM, RITA HAYWORTH and JACK LEMMON, as well as some good supporting actors, but there's a major disappointment.

The first half of the film deals with relationships and just starts to get added interest from the Mitchum-Hayworth chemistry when the story shifts gears and turns the rest of the plot over to Jack Lemmon for the film's climactic sub-plot. Ordinarily, this would have been fine, but not when viewers are expecting to see the Mitchum-Hayworth pairing develop into a deeper story of its own.

There's a lot of local color and some gorgeous scenery in Trinidad and Jamaica, but the story is an uninspired one that finally gets going once Hayworth enters the scene, then evaporates once she and Mitchum are given less to do.

Lemmon is fine as the happy go lucky, naive sort of bumbler he always played at this stage in his career. Hayworth is an even more jaded version of "Gilda" (maturing now and still quite attractive), and Mitchum is his usual laconic self.

Uneven as drama but watchable for its star appeal.

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.