Across the Pacific

United States

1942

97 Min

Black and White

1.37:1

Japanese, English

Currently 3.1/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

|

DIR Vincent Sherman, John Huston

CAST Mary Astor, Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, Charles Halton, Victor Sen Yung, Roland Got, Lee Tung Foo, Frank Wilcox, Paul Stanton, Monte Blue, Keye Luke

PROD DES Robert M. Haas, Hugh Reticker

Rick Leland makes no secret of the fact he has no loyalty to his home country after he is court-marshaled out of the army and boards a Japanese ship for the Orient in late 1941. But has Leland really been booted out, or is there some other motive for his getting close to fellow passenger Doctor Lorenz? Any motive for getting close to attractive traveller Alberta Marlow would however seem pretty obvious. —IMDb

Director

Vincent Sherman

Vincent Sherman (July 16, 1906 – June 18, 2006) was an American director, and actor, who worked in Hollywood. His movies include Mr. Skeffington (1944), Nora Prentiss (1947), and The Young Philadelphians (1959).

He began his career as an actor on Broadway and later films. He directed B-movies for Warner Bros. before moving up to A-pictures. He was a good friend of actor Errol Flynn, whom he directed in Adventures of Don Juan (1949). He directed three Joan Crawford movies The Damned Don’t Cry! (1950), Harriet Craig (1950), and Goodbye, My Fancy (1951).

Early life

Sherman was born Abraham Orovitz, to Jewish parents. He was born and grew up in the small town of Vienna, Georgia, where his father was a dry-goods salesman.Not long after graduating from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, he became a professional actor.

Career

Sherman arrived in New York to sell a play and soon became an actor. He made his debut at the stage in Counselor at Law, which starred… read more

Vincent Sherman (July 16, 1906 – June 18, 2006) was an American director, and actor, who worked in Hollywood. His movies include Mr. Skeffington (1944), Nora Prentiss (1947), and The Young Philadelphians (1959).

He began his career as an actor on Broadway and later films. He directed B-movies for Warner Bros. before moving up to A-pictures. He was a good friend of actor Errol Flynn, whom he directed in Adventures of Don Juan (1949). He directed three Joan Crawford movies The Damned Don’t Cry! (1950), Harriet Craig (1950), and Goodbye, My Fancy (1951).

Early life

Sherman was born Abraham Orovitz, to Jewish parents. He was born and grew up in the small town of Vienna, Georgia, where his father was a dry-goods salesman.Not long after graduating from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, he became a professional actor.

Career

Sherman arrived in New York to sell a play and soon became an actor. He made his debut at the stage in Counselor at Law, which starred John Barrymore. He arrived in Hollywood during the early talkie years, where he appeared in William Wyler’s 1933 film Counsellor at Law. In 1938, Sherman signed on at Warner Bros. as a director. His first film as a director was the 1939 horror film The Return of Doctor X, which starred Humphrey Bogart.

Sherman quickly built a reputation as a rewrite artist – his ability to take any script he was given and turn it into an absolute blockbuster. It was these skills that led him to much bigger and star-studded pictures. Sherman was initially known as a “woman’s director” during the mid ’40’s, but he eventually became a well-rounded filmmaker as his career went on.

After a very successful Hollywood film career, Sherman ended his career in television. However, in 2004, he was the oldest of 21 individuals interviewed in the documentary film “Imaginary Witness,” a work that chronicled sixty years of film-making that dealt in some way with the Holocaust

Personal life

Sherman was married to Hedda Comorau from 1931–1984. He had two children with Comorau: a son, Eric Sherman, and a daughter, Hedwin Naimark. He had a number of high-profile affairs during his life, including a three-year relationship with Joan Crawford. In his memoir Studio Affairs: My Life as a Film Director, he went into detail about his relationship with Crawford, as well as his relationship with Rita Hayworth. During the last nine years of his life, he was in a romantic relationship with Francine York.

Sherman was a good friend of Errol Flynn.

Sherman died less than a month shy of his 100th birthday, on June 18, 2006, at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. —Wikipedia

read less

John Huston

Adventure in many forms is the theme of many of John Huston’s films. His characters are constantly searching for “the stuff that dreams are made of” (the famous closing-line of his debut film The Maltese Falcon). Huston glorified this chase despite its frequent disillusionment and false promise, since it represented a flight from the complacent virtues of ordinary life. Like Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, Huston regarded civilization as a false surface which thinly veiled a hostile nature. Only those who lived at the edge, on the margins of society were regarded by Huston as fellow travellers. In films as diverse as The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle and Under the Volcano, Huston celebrated men who circled the abyss; characters who are driven to plunge head first into the void.
The son of the great theatre and film actor Walter Huston (who would win an Oscar under his son’s direction for his role in The Treasure of Sierra Madre) and crime journalist Rhea Gore… read more

Adventure in many forms is the theme of many of John Huston’s films. His characters are constantly searching for “the stuff that dreams are made of” (the famous closing-line of his debut film The Maltese Falcon). Huston glorified this chase despite its frequent disillusionment and false promise, since it represented a flight from the complacent virtues of ordinary life. Like Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, Huston regarded civilization as a false surface which thinly veiled a hostile nature. Only those who lived at the edge, on the margins of society were regarded by Huston as fellow travellers. In films as diverse as The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle and Under the Volcano, Huston celebrated men who circled the abyss; characters who are driven to plunge head first into the void.
The son of the great theatre and film actor Walter Huston (who would win an Oscar under his son’s direction for his role in The Treasure of Sierra Madre) and crime journalist Rhea Gore, John Huston enjoyed an itinerant youth; exposed to different walks of life while moving through a variety of careers. As a contract screenwriter for Warner Bros. he worked on films such as Jezebel, Juarez, Sergeant York and High Sierra. The latter film, directed by Raoul Walsh, was the first starring role for Humphrey Bogart who would become a regular collaborator, a close friend and the star of Huston’s directorial debut – The Maltese Falcon. This adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s classic novel is celebrated as an iconic film noir; sparking as many imitators as Citizen Kane, another debut film made the same year.

Huston’s success as a genre film-maker did not steer him away from his natural eclecticism and thirst for challenge. His most adventurous work in the 1940s is perhaps his war documentaries. Serving in the United States Army Signal Corps during the Second World War, Huston made groundbreaking films such as Report to the Aleutians and The Battle of San Pietro. Its technical innovation in cinematography and raw depiction of armed combat influenced many succeeding films about war, fiction and non-fiction alike. His most controversial documentary, Let There Be Light, was cited by Huston, in his autobiography, as a transformative experience. It marked a lifelong engagement with psychology; directly inspiring Freud, his 1962 biopic about the psychoanalyst’s early career. It’s setting in a psychiatric hospital which treated returning soldiers who suffered from shellshock was regarded by the Signal Corps to be demoralizing to the United States Army and the American public. As a result, the film was shelved and withdrawn from public exhibition until 1980.

The post-war career of Huston followed two alternating currents of studio projects and personal works, many of them adaptations of literary classics. Shot in Ireland, Moby Dick was a difficult but rewarding production; its innovative cinematography by Oswald Morris resulted in one of Huston’s most expressive uses of colour. His most consistent period extended from Fat City (1972)to Wise Blood (1979), tough intimate dramas of failure and defeat. This cycle ended with Under the Volcano, perhaps the darkest of Huston’s gazes into the abyss. The Dead, his final film, made on his deathbed with the help of his children and an oxygen tank, is a work of serene majesty and rousing beauty. —Mr Bongo

read less