ACROSS THE PACIFIC (1942)
"All that funny business on the boat--what did it mean, really?"
3.5 out of ****
Starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet Directed by John Huston Written by Richard Macaulay Cinematography by Arthur Edeson
The Genoa Maru is a ship bound for Japan, with a handful of passengers aboard. They are Rick Leland, an artillery officer recently given a dishonourable discharge; Dr. Lorenz, an intellectual American ex-pat who has lived in Asia for 30 years; and Alberta Marlow, a woman from Medicine Hat, Alberta, who sells peanut brittle in a ten-cent shop. Well, that's who they say they are. We're pretty sure they're lying, and, indeed, they are. Finding out who they really are--and why they're on board the vessel at the same time--is one of the many pleasures in John Huston's ACROSS THE PACIFIC.
The passengers are also Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet, reunited with Huston and cinematographer Arthur Edeson (CASABLANCA) for the follow-up to the director's stunning debut, THE MALTESE FALCON. With a cast like that, under the guidance of a master like Huston, the film seems almost guaranteed to offer splendid entertainment--and that is precisely what it does.
The events take place during World War II, and involve a sinister anti-American plot by the villain, Greenstreet, who is allied with the Japanese. To reveal more would be to spoil the fun: Richard Macaulay's script is tight, tense, and compelling. But, this being a Bogart movie of the 40s, it's also fairly predictable: we know he'll defeat the villain, and we suspect he'll win the lady's heart. What makes it so entertaining are the little things. The dialogue is wonderful: fast, funny, and perfectly suited to these actors. Greenstreet plays an expansive, sophisticated villain as only he can; Bogart is, well, Bogart, except here his persona is a little less cynical than usual, a little more playful. And Astor's Alberta Marlow is particularly refreshing--a smart, independent woman who loves to engage Bogey in verbal fencing matches. Their repartee is consistently witty and playful. After their first kiss, which happens while Alberta is still finding her sea legs, she remarks, I feel sick; Bogart asks if that's normal, and she retorts, how do women usually respond when you kiss them? They trade pointed rejoinders throughout, to our delight. If only people talked like that in real life; if only they still talked like that in the movies.
The interactions between other characters are equally sharp. After a shooting incident, Bogart and Greenstreet discuss the preponderance of guns on the ship, and when each reveals his own weapon, Bogart playfully comments, "Mine's bigger than yours," relishing the silly Freudianism. They are later joined by Joe Totsuiko (Victor Sen Yung), a second-generation American (with hidden motives, of course) who desperately wants to sound like an authentic Yankee, so he speaks with splendidly overblown American diction, calling Rick "Ricky" and saying things like "I wonder if those Panamanian mamas are all they're cracked up to be."
If the characters did nothing else but talk, this would be great stuff, but there's no shortage of secret identities, double-dealings, and revelations. The pace never flags, sweeping us along from Halifax to New York and on to Panama, where the film ends, despite the title. In Panama, the characters finally confront each other, all truths are finally unveiled, and then the finale devolves into a rather mundane action sequence. The ending, indeed, is the weakest part of the movie, particularly in the wake of THE MALTESE FALCON, where the conclusion was absolutely perfect.
ACROSS THE PACIFIC was filmed during World War II, and not surprisingly, it contains no small amount of pro-U.S. propaganda. The final shot shows American planes flying west to (paraphrasing Bogart's character) help the Japs commit hara-kiri, and could have been lifted straight from a war-time documentary. There is also a gallery of laughable Asian caricatures and some extremely racist dialogue. At one point, Bogart complains that all Japanese look the same, and Astor says they don't--upon close examination; Greenstreet refers to the Japanese as "wonderful little people." The actors seem to be aware of how ridiculous these lines are, and deliver them tongue-in-cheek, so that these moments are not as ugly as they might have been. Fortunately, while Huston himself left to help the war effort before filming was complete (Vincent Sherman took over), his movie plays mostly as entertainment, not propaganda, and it is a thoroughly enjoyable diversion. Only a director whose first film was THE MALTESE FALCON could make a second film this good, and have it be a weaker effort.
A Review by David Dalgleish (January 31/98)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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