Pacific Inferno

A World War II action-adventure yarn set and filmed in the Philippines. Initially entitled Do They Ever Cry in America? (a line paraphrased at the end of the film), it’s obvious that the delivered product was not as envisaged by the producers; the film was delayed after completion, padded out with footage cribbed from Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and branded with the new punchier war oriented Pacific Inferno. This was Filipino based writer and director Rolf Bayer’s last film.

A written prologue informs us that in 1942 over $16M in silver Pesos was dumped in Manila Bay under orders of General MacArthur. After which we cut to oodles of attack footage ‘borrowed’ from the aforementioned Tora! Tora! Tora!. The credits roll and the story kicks in: four POW diving experts — Clyde Preston (Jim Brown), Robert Fletcher (Richard Jaeckel), Zoe Dawson (Tim Brown) and the racist Lt. Butts (Rik Van Nutter) — are forced by their Japanese captors into retrieving the cache of Pesos lying in wooden boxes under the waves. Also interested in the silver is an arm of the Filipino resistance, stationed incognito at a nearby fishing village. A message is relayed to the four through a fellow prisoner that they should deliver the coins to the resistance at an underwater drop off point or face death.

The group are faced with retrieving coins by day for the Japanese, and by night for the resistance movement — ferried to the checkpoint on a submerged wooden barge with attached inflated goat skins. Preston and Fletcher strike up an alliance with the group, and the operation runs smoothly until some coins are accidentally discovered in a fishing basket on a market stall by Japanese soldiers.

This discovery in its turn, grabs the attentions of the Japanese Intelligence Agency which traces the origin of coins to the internment camp by the Bay. The arrival of the agency to interrogate the prisoners is the catalyst for the predictable and literally explosive finale.