The Sand Pebbles (1966)

The Sand Pebbles
Directed by Robert Wise
Written by Robert Anderson from a novel by Richard McKenna
1966/USA
Argyle Productions/Solar Productions/Robert Wise Productions/Twentieth Century Fox
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Jake Holman: Hello, Engine; I’m Jake Holman.[/box]

Despite all its accolades, this grouchy viewer found The Sand Pebbles to be a 3-hour snooze-fest punctuated by episodes of cruelty and racial violence.  Not my cup of tea at all.

The year is 1926 and the setting is a tributary of the Yangtse River in China.  Revolution is in the air.  The Great Powers are still attempting gunboat diplomacy.  Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) is an engineer in the U.S. Navy whose whole life is engines.  He is looking forward to serving on an older gunboat where he can be his own boss.  He finds out too late that crazy Captain Collins (Richard Crenna) has hired Chinese coolies to perform all the manual labor on board.  All the Americans on board are supposed to be available for the ship’s military mission should it ever have one.  The coolie in charge of the engine room tries to sabotage Jake.

Eventually, that coolie is killed and Jake is forced to train another Chinese to take his place.   Po-han (Mako) and Jake eventually become friends. Po-han pays dearly for this.  Jake has a tentative romance with a schoolteacher (Candice Bergen) who works in a missionary compound up river. In the meantime, shipmate Frenchy (Richard Attenborough) falls in love with a Chinese virgin who his being held for sale to the highest bidders.  The local population becomes more and more hostile to the American presence.   I’ll stop there.

Within the first 15-minutes of this film it was clear that Wise was as interested in making a travelogue as in making an action movie.  So we get a lot of beautiful scenery that does not advance the action.  On top of that, Steve McQueen is forced to act a lot with his face.  This is not his forte.  We spend many minutes watching him explore the engine while contemplating something or other.  The action picks up whenever the Chinese enter the picture.  Unfotunately, they are usually being subjected to cruel treatment.  I’m not big on watching that kind of thing either.  So it wasn’t for me.  Jerry Goldsmith’s score is a thing of beauty, however.

The Sand Pebbles was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of: Best Picture; Best Actor; Best Supporting Actor (Mako); Best Cinematography, Color; Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color; Best Sound; Best Film Editing; and Best Music, Original Score.