Robert Parrish was a child actor, then one of the best editors in Hollywood before he became a film director. And while he was no David Lean, still the most famous editor to cross over into calling all the shots on the set, Parrish was a skilled craftsman whose films were always competent and polished, even the ones that didn’t quite work.

In his later years, he wrote one of the best memoirs about “the business,” “Growing Up in Hollywood.”

I can’t remember what he said in that book about “Fire Down Below,” one of the most lavish productions of 1957 — Rita Hayworth, lured out of a four year “retirement” to star as the on-the-lam redhead who comes between Robert Mitchum and Jack Lemmon, Technicolor and Cinemascope wide screen, filmed on location in Trinidad and Tobago.

But the evidence of what went right and what didn’t come off is right there on the screen, a lavish movie awash in “local color” that “limbos” out of the gate and gets up a fine head of steam before settling into torpid, inert melodrama that loses track of its leading lady for much of the third act.

The editor turned director had to recut what apparently was a story, told mostly in flashbacks (similar to Hayworth’s Welles classic, “The Lady from Shanghai”) to get his real “star” on the screen earlier.

That turns over the long, languid third act to a sailor trapped on a slowly-burning freighter, and the harbor master (Herbert Lom) and port doctor (Bernard Lee) who are among those trying to save him.

But the picturesque tale of two boat bums smuggling a gorgeous and often “kept” European refugee with “no papers” from port to port has a lot to recommend it until it goes wrong.

And producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli was so enamoured of the experience that he and Harry Saltzman would buy the rights to Caribbean resident Ian Fleming’s James Bond and make “Dr. No” and other films in this exotic world that few, back then, had traveled to.

Mitchum’s the grizzled old salt Felix and Lemmon’s Tony a Korean War veteran who have met and bought the old wooden coaster “Ruby,” making ends meet by smuggling this or that form of contraband, with help from their Trinidadian crewman Jimmy Jean (Edric Connor, terrific) and a shady bartender middle-man (Anthony Newley, perfectly oily).

It takes a lot of negotiating to talk them into human trafficking. Irena (Hayworth) sits by as the latest man to “keep” her and the two friends haggle over the risk and the price.

“I’m coming from nowhere, illegally, and I’m on my way to nowhere, equally illegally” is all she’ll say.

Over the course of their journey from “San Juan” to “Santa Nada,” they will stop for Carnivale and a swim. Tony will fall for Irena and Felix will fail to sway him about her true nature, her sordid past and the ways she’s always been “kept” by men who fall under her spell.

Novelist, playwright and screenwriter Irwin Shaw (“The Young Lions,””Rich Man, Poor Man”) turned the Max Catto novel into a script filled with pungent dialogue.

“Forget it. Forget me. I always get by somehow.””Sometimes you wonder what God had in mind when he invented the male sex.” “I’m waiting for someone to touch me with kindness.”

Hayworth cuts loose with hair-flinging abandon in a street dance scene during Carnivale that shows us exactly why Columbia kept her under contract all those years. Mitchum was just settling into his world weary cynicism and Lemmon’s still in his eager beaver “Mister Roberts/The Apartment” youth.

Connor’s singing baritine Jimmy Jean is both a stereotype and a lot more, as we see in this film the slow pace of change in the cinema’s treatment of Black characters. An actor had to bring a lot of presence to expand the reach of a role in such performances, and Connor does. It’s a pity he didn’t come along 20 years later, or that Hollywood didn’t fully evolve after “Casablanca.”

Port doctor Lee would go on to play “M” in the Broccoli-produced Bond pictures, and Lom would become the object of Inspector Clouseau’s torment in those Peter Sellers comedies. Parrish, the director, would make two Sellers films of his own.

This movie? It’s got a lot to offer, even if it finished narrowly in the red when it came out and didn’t figure in anybody’s “best films” lists, then or now. Whatever its failings, “Fire Down Below” didn’t end anybody’s career.

Think of it as a multi-million dollar location scout for James Bond movies, one with Rita and Mitchum and Good Neighbor Jack along for the slow boat ride over the gin-clear waters of the Caribbean Sea.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum, Jack Lemmon, Edric Connor, Bernard Lee, Herbert Lom and Anthony Newley

Credits: Directed by Robert Parrish, scripted by Irwin Shaw, based on a novel by Max Catto. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, et al.

Running time: 1:56