Across the Pacific

John Huston brought the trio of Bogey, Mary Astor, and Sidney Greenstreet back a year after The Maltese Falcon for this rather cobbled-together story of the last weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In fact, the original script dealt with Bogey discovering that the attack was going to happen … but reality trumped fiction, and when the Japs bombed us they re-wrote the script to make the planned attack on the Panama Canal instead. Thus making the title rather odd, since the ship they are all on never even reaches the Pacific, much less crosses it. To complicate matters even further, Huston entered the Army before the shoot was over, and took the script with him! No one knew how it was supposed to end (our hero was trapped in a house at gunpoint, and Huston said “Bogey will know how to get out.”), and the ending they came up with was unlikely. This is a pretty standard thriller, but fun in its own way.