Across the Pacific (1942 John Huston)

Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet, Victor Sen Yung (all pictured below).

Also Charles Halton (as 'Smith') is familiar from somewhere, Lee Tung Foo (Sam), Monte Blue (alky father), Keye Luke (steamship office clerk).

Ah so! Confusingly, film was made after Pearl Harbour but is set before it.

Huston's first film about people who aren't in their natural habitat, a recurrent theme from African Queen to The Man Who Would be King.

Good script from Richard Macaulay (based on the newspaper serial by Robert Carson), in which Bogie seems to be a disgraced soldier turned mercenary who enjoys flirting with Mary Astor. They're in the safe hands of Arthur Edeson (camera) and Adolph Deutsch (music, who bravely didn't Americanise his name!) The Astor-Bogart relationship is more enjoyable than in the previous Maltese Falcon.

Famously, Huston went off to make war films, leaving Vincent Sherman to finish this. (In his autobiography An Open Book, Huston describes leaving Sherman with the problem that Bogie is tied up in a room surrounded by Japanese guards, an impossible situation to escape from. That's all very well, but there's no such scene in the film, just going to show that you can't necessarily trust famous directors' autobiographies. Powell is another one with a rather fanciful memory.)

'You certainly are a girl of many colours. First your legs get blue, then your face turns green, and now you're red all over."

End sequence is a Bond blueprint: cinema escape, monstrous villain's lair, weapon of mass destruction, and suited hero in exotic setting. Cue Goldfinger / Thunderball.