Across the Pacific (1942) on Netflix
Passed19421h 37mActionAdventureDrama
Court-martialed out of the Army, Rick Leland boards a Japanese ship bound for the Orient, saying he will fight for whoever pays. Fellow passengers Alberta Marlow and Dr. Lorenz.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb6.8/105,881 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes80%
Trailer
Plot summary
In November 1941, on Governor's Island in New York City, Captain Rick Leland faces a court-martial and is discharged from the Coast Artillery Corps for stealing. Turned away by a Canadian regiment he tries to join, he takes passage on the Genoa Maru, a Japanese ship bound from Halifax for Yokohama by way of the Panama Canal and Hawaii. Aboard he meets Alberta Marlow, a Canadian who says she is from Medicine Hat, and Dr. Lorenz, a professor of sociology who admires the Japanese and is unpopular in the Philippines, where he lives. Leland lets it be known that he will fight for anyone who pays him enough.
Cast
- Tom Stevensonas Unidentified Man
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Across the Pacific (1942)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- John Huston was called up by the Army Service Forces Signal Corps during filming and deliberately left the character Leland tied up and held at gunpoint in a cliff-hanger for his replacement to solve. Vincent Sherman took over on April 22, 1942, and finished the film without the script Huston had taken with him.
- The original script was about foiling a Japanese plan to invade Pearl Harbor; when the real attack occurred, production was shut down for three months, resuming on March 2, 1942, with the target changed to Panama.
- Mary Astor later recalled that the internment of Japanese Americans, ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 3, 1942, deprived Japanese actors of jobs on the film, though the studio's files show ethnically Chinese actors were cast as the Japanese characters from the beginning.
- Turner Classic Movies' Bret Wood reports that John Huston created the effect of being on the ocean by having the ship's deck set built on a platform supported by hydraulic lifts that kept everything moving.
