Across the Pacific

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

When John Huston is on his game, he doesn't fuck around. For his directorial debut, he made The Maltese Falcon, which is not only my favorite detective movie of all time, but also probably my favorite tough-guy movie. The style and the character/performance of Sam Spade pretty much set the stage for every private eye movie to follow... almost all movie private eyes are either Spade clones, or deliberately unlike Spade. He is the epitome of the movie detective: a sleazy hardass with a personal moral code. Only Spade is way more of a bastard than other movies usually have the guts to make their lead.

So, following up on Falcon's success, he reunited with half the cast (Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet), and made a fun, relatively lightweight, sexist, racist spy-thriller about Bogart trying to stop an evil Japanese conspiracy while on a pleasure cruise.

Falcon is a pretty hard act to follow, so it's no surprise that this doesn't come close to living up to it. But I'm happy to report that it's still a pretty entertaining movie, maybe a little disposable, but the (obvious) chemistry of the cast goes a long way to helping it along.

I said it was racist, and I'm pretty sure it is, because every single damn Japanese person in the cast turns out to be part of the evil conspiracy, like it's The Wicker Man on a cruise ship. But at the same time, earlier scenes seem to make a genuine (if not an entirely insightful) attempt at showing respect to some Japanese customs and attitudes... maybe Huston is trying to show that he's not racist, I guess, but when all the Japanese turn out to be evil spies it kind of undercuts any earlier attempts at diplomacy.

Or maybe, just maybe, all the earlier stuff is just so Huston can mock pussy liberals who would be offended by blatantly demonizing the Japanese. I dunno.

Either way, the racism actually makes the movie a little extra interesting.

So, not a classic, but it's got some good visuals, good action, good acting, good fun , and unsettling racism.