What really weakens what could have been a good narrative is the attempt to insert light hearted comic elements into the plot of PACIFIC RENDEZVOUS. Instead of playing it as straight drama, what could have emerged as a timely romantic drama about breaking the Japanese code during WWII becomes a trivial piece of fluff with an absurd spotlight on the silly character played by Jean Rogers.She's the girlfriend of our hero (Lee Bowman) and does him no favors when it comes to helping the war effort crack the code. For sheer stupidity (and to make her character seem "cute" at all times), she slips dozens of sleeping pills in his coffee so he can get some rest from a heavy schedule of solving the code and ignoring her.And throughout the movie she pouts, bounces around and shows jealousy of any other female who pursues Bowman, as for example female spy Mona Maris. Her acting is dreadful enough to bring the story down to the level of irritating fluff where it remains until the final reel.An interesting cast headed by Lee Bowman, Russell Hicks, Mona Maris, Carl Esmond, Hans Conreid, Curt Bois and several other good players is defeated by a silly script which reduces the whole thing to a B-budget MGM programmer which played the lower half of double features in the '40s.

Looking at some of the other comments, I started to wonder if they and I had seen different movies.Or maybe they were just in a bad mood while watching.Regardless, I loved this movie. I found the performers -- mostly un- or little-known actors -- very good and likable. Even the bad guys displayed a certain charm.The dialog was often clever, and often downright funny.The story itself was perhaps not edge-of-the-seat exciting -- I mean, heck, of course the good guys were gonna win; after all, it was a wartime film -- but it kept a willing viewer watching.If you've not seen this, I recommend it. Just remember: Context, context, context. Remember when it was made, and what was going on in the world.And, as always, suspend your disbelief. Relax and enjoy.

This is almost like two films--one literate and engaging, the other stupid and clichéd. It's really a shame all the problems weren't worked out with the writing, but considering how quickly most B-movies were written and produced, this isn't too unusual. It's a real shame, though, as this could have been a very good film.First the good. The movie is original and involves WWII code-breakers. This is pretty fascinating and I liked watching the leading man (Lee Bowman) go through his paces as a master code-breaker. In fact, the first two-thirds of the film was very good. But now for the bad, the film just went on way too long and lost steam at about 50 minutes. Additionally, Jean Rogers' role as the "kooky girlfriend" must rank as one of the worst-written and distracting roles in film history!! For every smart move made by Bowman, the idiot Rogers then stepped in to screw things up as some sort of misguided "comedy relief". If her role had been intelligently written, the overall film would have improved immensely! Instead, watching her, it's hard to understand how we actually won WWII!!

Ludicrous violations of the most basic security regs are only the beginning. It's hard to see how they achieved such abysmal trash on such a low budget. I turned it off once, then got curious to see if it could get any worse. It did.