A troubled movie production, parented by too many writers and directors, usually ends in catastrophe. So it is no small thing when a director swoops in to salvage a debacle, creating immediate profit and enduring pleasure. A series of neglected films, released today from Columbia Pictures under the inexplicable title “Martini Movies” (do you have to imbibe a few dry ones to endure them?), offers three slick, big-star vehicles from the early 1970s — “The Anderson Tapes,” “The New Centurions,” and “$” — and two narrowly averted disasters from the 1950s. The latter provide the most rewards, and are signed by the same director, Vincent Sherman.

If Sherman’s name fails to ring a bell, several of his films should: “The Hard Way,” “Old Acquaintance,” “Mr. Skeffington,” “Nora Prentiss,” “The Unfaithful.” These were made in the 1940s, his great decade as a Warner Bros. contract director, and helped define the careers of Ida Lupino, Bette Davis, and Ann Sheridan. But the films also earned him an unwelcome reputation as a women’s director, though even the soapiest of them concern tough, loveless women and boast an acidic wit at odds with glibly jerked tears. All are impeccably crafted, with brisk editing and dramatically expressive angles, shadows, and tracking shots. The histrionic urgency and plush physical texture of Sherman’s films counter the implausible, routine scripts.

Sherman began as an actor, first onstage and then in the movies, where he turned to screenwriting before landing the unlikely directorial debut assignment of Humphrey Bogart’s 1939 vampire movie, “The Return of Dr. X.” The 1950s were hard years, marred by the blacklist and unsuitable projects, and after a few misfires in the early 1960s, Sherman turned to television. He died in 2006, a month short of his 100th birthday.

At 90, Sherman published his kiss-and-tell-and-kiss-again memoir, “Studio Affairs,” recounting romances with leading ladies throughout the course of his marriage, including a liaison with the cinematically incandescent but privately lovelorn Rita Hayworth. In 1952, Hayworth had returned to Hollywood and Columbia Pictures after a four-year marriage to Aly Khan. Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn ordered her to appear in a retread of her signature hit, “Gilda,” called “An Affair in Trinidad.” It was to be directed by Sherman.

They had everything but a script, and never did get one worth shooting — eight writers added their two cents, four of them earning on-screen credits. The plot gets under way with the discovery of the murdered, estranged husband of a nightclub dancer, Chris Emery (Hayworth), and is so incoherent that we never find out why he was killed, or by whom, or why he was estranged, or why he summoned his brother to Trinidad, except that the bad-mannered brother is played, one-dimensionally, by Glenn Ford, Hayworth’s flame in “Gilda.”

The story goes downhill from there, incorporating elements of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” (without its sexual compromise) and anticipating the climax of Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”: The tuxedoed, silk-spoken villain (Alexander Scourby) discovers that his fiancée Chris is a spy, and prepares to dispose of her from his plane.

Hayworth is the only reason to see this film, and if you need a better reason, “An Affair in Trinidad” isn’t for you. Sherman knew this. He moves things along so quickly that the film survives as a moody valentine to un-blushing star power. Audiences knew it, too: “An Affair in Trinidad” actually out-grossed the superior “Gilda.” At 34, Hayworth’s fresh face had taken on an edgy wariness, which is indelibly captured in a close-up as she stands smoking on the veranda, the light barely revealing her — unlike Ford, who shares the scene lit up like a spark plug.

When Hayworth dances, she is transformed, and she has two terrific numbers, choreographed by Valerie Bettis, who appears hilariously as the alcoholic floozy Veronica, uttering the film’s inside joke: She wishes she could dance like Chris. In dance, Hayworth is no longer in character. She is redeemed or, as the obsequious club owner (played by Steven Geray) tries to explain, “She is not just a woman, some woman. She’s Woman with capital W!” Saul Chaplin arranged two undervalued songs by Lester Lee and Bob Russell: “Trinidad Lady” overlays bop triplets on a mild calypso rhythm, and “I’ve Been Kissed Before” is a tauntingly swinging tune overdue for rediscovery. In these numbers, Hayworth (who flawlessly lip-synchs vocalist Jo Ann Greer) goes beyond the glove-removing tease of “Gilda” for a skirt-hiked, knees-bowed, energetic ritual of terpsichorean eros. Plot points be damned.

After “An Affair in Trinidad,” Sherman was shunted aside by the blacklist. Except for one film in Italy, he didn’t direct for five years. His first post-exile credit began as a reluctant favor to Cohn, who had fired Robert Aldrich from a film tentatively called “The Garment Center,” and asked Sherman to finish it. It was unpleasant taking over another man’s picture, particularly one starring Lee J. Cobb, whom Sherman had known years before, and who had been a friendly witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

But Sherman went forward, retooling the script and, by his own account, directing 70% of the film released as “The Garment Jungle.” Sherman credited Aldrich with many good scenes and wrote that he expected a secondary credit, not the sole credit that Cohn gave him. Aldrich is generally presumed to have directed the action scenes, but it was Sherman who revised the plot to make plausible Cobb’s character: a dress manufacturer who hires thugs to thwart the union and then has to answer to the moral disillusionment of his son, played by Kerwin Mathews. Sherman undoubtedly added domestic touches that were unheard of in 1950s Hollywood — a father changing his baby’s diapers, his wife breast-feeding the child in a bar. But trying to assign authorship is a pointless exercise: “The Garment Jungle” is a surprisingly coherent, powerful film.

It belongs to a cycle of 1950s gangster films about union organizing, including “On the Waterfront,” “Salt of the Earth,” “Slaughter on Seventh Avenue,” and “The Big Operator.” In each, mobsters commit atrocious crimes, martyring union leaders, and are ultimately brought to justice by the workers. “The Garment Jungle” is set apart in its careful approach to the business. It is filled with accurate details, including the phony wood-paneled offices, the dreary hallways, the general tumult, the juxtaposition of a showroom adorned with models and a sweatshop of underpaid sewers. It is also distinctive for its craven avoidance of ethnicity.

Mafia? There is no mafia. The only Italians in the film are good guys: Tony, the floor manager (a nicely nuanced performance by Harold J. Stone), and Tulio, the union martyr, played with slithery energy by Robert Loggia in his first film. The chief killer, embodied by a relentlessly malevolent Richard Boone, is called Ravidge. Solid performances — including Gia Scala, at the peak of her brief career, and wild-eyed Joseph Wiseman, who could turn a line of lackluster dialogue into a sonata of ulcerous torment — add to the tension, which rarely falters, beginning with the opening in media res: a shot of two partners shouting.

A few location shots underscore a feeling for the period and milieu, especially as the film moves to an uneasily quiet Lower East Side four-story walk-up, counterpointing the wealth of the manufacturer’s home and the clamor of the garment center. If the finish is a fairy tale, it comes as Boone’s madman wipes up the floor with Mathews’s innocent. We don’t believe the sitcom ending, and we’re not meant to. The jungle has simply undergone a turnover, union or no union.