Across the Pacific

John Huston enjoys a good jest, the fact that a story called Across the Pacific unfolds in the Atlantic is merely the first gag in this mock-patriotic pulp. (It would take ten years and Beat the Devil for the send-up style to become clear.) Out of New York and off to Canada for the disgraced Army captain (Humphrey Bogart), even there the only place for a corruptible artillerist is on the Japanese freighter headed to Panama. Among the passengers is the lass from Medicine Hat (Mary Astor), ready for romance but defeated by the combination of bread pudding and a swaying deck, Bogart chuckles at her seasickness and she returns the favor after he's laid flat by whiskey. "You give your lovemaking an assault-and-battery twist," purrs Sydney Greenstreet in white linen and matching fan, further pointing up the jocular Maltese Falcon link. (As the "Jap gunsel" armed with judo throw and hepcat slang, Victor Sen Yung blithely avenges Elisha Cook Jr.) It's all repartee and pistol-measuring winks until the newspaper headline reveals the date to be December 6th, 1941, then the masks drop and the canal becomes an imperial bullseye. "Some joke, huh?" The beginning of the war means the beginning of war propaganda, the knife-throwing scuffle behind the flickering theater screen dilates into a machine-gun skirmish. (Kurosawa in Sanshiro Sugata Part Two has the other side of the coin.) Lieutenant Huston was off to Europe and left Vincent Sherman to wrap the gung-ho pamphlet, U.S. squadrons fill the sky at the close: "Any of your friends in Tokyo have trouble committing hara-kiri, those boys will be glad to help them out." With Charles Halton, Lee Tung Foo, Richard Loo, Keye Luke, and Monte Blue. In black and white.