Across the Pacific (1942)

Directed by John Huston & Vincent Sherman. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Victor Sen Yung, Kam Tong, Roland Got, Charles Halton, Frank Wilcox, Paul Stanton.

Discharged from duty for theft, ex-Army officer Bogart is looking for a foreign service to join when he ends up on a ship traveling between Canada and Japan via the Panama Canal. Not all is as it seems, however, for his motives and those of the other morally-dubious passengers, including Canadian Astor and Greenstreet’s shifty doctor, whose sympathies to the Japanese are outspoken. On the basis of cast, atmosphere, and plot particulars, call this a transitional Missing Link between The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca (Bogey even plays a fella named Rick), a complicated spy thriller that may be nowhere in the same league as those two films, but is reasonably entertaining all the same. Good dialogue from Richard Macaulay’s script (loosely inspired by a magazine serial by Robert Carson, “Aloha Means Goodbye”), and it’s refreshing to see East Asian roles being played by actors of East Asian descent…even though it’s mostly Chinese-Americans playing Japanese schemers. Note: it’s a movie with a very curious title—since the major players get stuck at the Panama Canal, no one ever ends up reaching the Pacific! Vincent Sherman took over for John Huston in the director’s chair during the post-Pearl Harbor shooting hiatus after Huston left the production to serve the war effort as a documentarian.

71/100