From the Rental Vault: The Fire Down Below (1957)

The "smartest people in the room" theory suggests that someone wanting to hire a team might not necessarily look for people with the most experience in a particular area. Rather, someone who demonstrates they're intelligent and creative could, when pointed at a problem or project, come up with an idea that the experienced person might not. A group of such geniuses could be capable of anything, whether they knew all that much about the field or matter at hand or not. Similar ideas lie behind movies that assemble large casts of stars, figuring that such powerhouses of talent and charisma are bound to make even "meh" material a sure-fire hit.

The former idea produced Enron and a book of that title by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. The latter idea has given rise to any number of box-office clunkers when it becomes clear that some movie stars are better in their natural element no matter how great their performing cast winds up being, such as 1957's Fire Down Below, directed by Robert Parrish and taken from the novel of that name by Max Catto.

Fire is a story of folks generally dealt bad hands by life who have been burnt one too many times and are now trying to get by as best as they can. Even though it's filmed in Technicolor and set in the Caribbean, it's got noir written all over it. So naturally Felix,  the older, harder man in a potential love triangle is played by Robert Mitchum, a man whose drooping features and cynical wit would have invented film noir if it didn't already exist. The femme fatale Irena, an expatriate European lady with a shadowy past -- meaning much of it is unknown and the rest is not pretty -- is played by Rita Hayworth, whose personal life seemed like it came from a novel. Tony, the youngest leg of the triangle, is a wandering son of a wealthy man who doesn't yet want to anchor himself to regular life and so hooked up with Felix to make small-scale smuggling runs with their Jamaican partner Jimmy Jean (Edric Connor) in the tramp steamer Ruby. He's played by Jack Lemmon, a miscasting that sets Fire laboring against a strong headwind. Lemmon even at that point in his career was terrifically talented and his mantle held a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. But nothing about his demeanor either personally or professionally suggests the baggage of the past carried by his co-stars, making him simply unequal to Mitchum as a serious candidate for Hayworth's affections.

And when Fire shifts to focus on Lemmon solo when he is trapped inside a doomed cargo ship even the rather lightweight buildup of tension it's produced to that point blows away. Lemmon's Tony is the youngest and least interesting of the three, so no matter how good Lemmon is playing him it doesn't matter because the far more intriguing Felix and Irena are offscreen.

In the end Fire is more interesting for some coincidences and incidentals than for the movie itself: It was Hayworth's first movie in four years, Lemmon composed the harmonica theme used in the movie and would later play a "Felix" in one of his best-known movies, The Odd Couple, and Mitchum became so fascinated by the island music scene that he recorded an album called Calypso Is Like So. It was re-released in 1995.