This film is okay -- watchable and even interesting -- but one can't help comparing it to "The Maltese Falcon" which appeared the previous year. Same principle actors -- Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet -- no Peter Lorre fondling the handle of his cane, alas, and no gunsel -- and, for the most part, the same Director, John Huston. Huston was called up for Signal Corps duty halfway through filming and as a gag shot the scenes up to the point at which Bogart was strapped helplessly into a chair and surrounded by armed guards, a situation seemingly without the possibility of escape. Then Huston cheerfully said goodbye and walked off the set, leaving his replacement, Vincent Sherman, to try to figure out how to get Bogart free.
It may be unfair to compare "Across the Pacific" to a lucky shot like "The Maltese Falcon," but this film invites the comparison. Not just the same performers but similar lines -- "You're good, Angel, very, very good." But in Falcon the actors fit their fictional characters like enzymes accommodating themselves to a substrate. Here they are just actors playing familiar roles: the obese villain, the officer who's dishonorable discharge is faked so he can go undercover (Gary Cooper could have done as well, and in fact DID in a later movie), the innocent woman made to look bad because the enemy has imprisoned her dissolute father. The Japanese are all plain-vanilla bad guys, even the familiar young one who makes amusing wisecracks in American slang. And all the Japanese have real names like Tong, Chan, Loo, Fong, and Ahn. (To be fair, the last one is Korean, not Chinese.)
If the characters are not nearly as much fun to watch as in "The Maltese Falcon," the plot is no more than a simple war-time mystery involving secret information that the Japanese want to use to start the war by torpedoing the locks of the Panama Canal. Actually, the Japanese did develop such plans later in the war. They intended to deliver a handful of torpedo planes to the vicinity of the Canal in huge submarines, which were available. The planes were not, and the plans folded when the war ended.
In the movie, the characters move from New York to Canada, then board a Japanese steamer, back to New York, then to Panama, where they disembark. They travel from the Atlantic side of the canal to the Pacific -- but they never make it across the Pacific.
