Across the Pacific is a 1942 American spy film set on the eve of the entry of the United States into World War II.

When the real-life attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, production was shut down for three months, resuming on March 2, 1942, with a revised script changing the target to Panama.

[4][5] The screenplay by Richard Macauley was an adaptation of a Saturday Evening Post serial by Robert Carson, “Aloha Means Goodbye”, published June 28–July 26, 1941.

On November 17, 1941, on Governor's Island in New York City, Captain Rick Leland is court-martialed and discharged from the United States Army Coast Artillery Corps after he is caught stealing.

Ostensibly on his way to China to fight for Chiang Kai-shek, he boards a Japanese ship, the Genoa Maru, sailing from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Yokohama via the Panama Canal and Hawaii.

During a stop in New York City, Leland is revealed as a secret agent when he reports to Colonel Hart, an undercover Army Intelligence officer.

On December 6, 1941, Leland meets with his local contact, A. V. Smith, and convinces him to provide real timetables, as Lorenz would recognize fakes.

Smith adds that plantation owner Dan Morton is a rich dipsomaniac and that Marlow is a buyer for Rogers Fifth Avenue in New York City.

[5] TCM's Bret Wood reports that John Huston created the effect of being on the ocean by having the set of the ship's deck built on a platform supported by hydraulic lifts to keep everything moving.

In some of the interior shots, “The camera subtly, almost imperceptibly, edges toward and away from the actors, providing a vaguely disorienting effect that well serves the film's ever-shifting moral ground.”[10] Adolph Deutsch turned the Engineers Hymn[11] (as played to the tune of “The Son of a Gambolier”) into an evocative theme for the character of Richard Leland.

We also hear a few poignant measures of West Point's “Alma Mater ”[12][13] after the court-martial, when Leland looks at his class ring and puts it back on his finger.

The file on Across the Pacific in the USC Cinema-Television Library shows that ethnically Chinese actors were cast as the Japanese characters from the beginning.

Huston directs deftly from thrill-packed script by Macauley.”[6] On Sept. 5, 1942, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times had high praise for “young Mr. Huston... he has made a spy picture this time which tingles with fearful uncertainties and glints with the sheen of blue steel... (taking) his audience right into the picture by artful camera work dependent on close-ups...

It's like having a knife at your ribs for an hour and a half.”[15] Across the Pacific was adapted as a radio play on The Screen Guild Theater's January 25, 1943, broadcast with Bogart, Astor, and Greenstreet reprising their film roles.