The Sand Pebbles

TSP

TSP


The Sand Pebbles – A film so long (three hours) that even the DVD comes with an intermission! Aw heck, the intermission is swell, with its highly dated music (they really don’t make swelling soundtracks like that any more!). Shanghai 1926, and a sailor arriving with his orders, checking into a hotel, buying himself a girl. He gets onto his boat, figures out how things work, and meets the people, making friends with a big dumb sailor called Frenchy. Nice. They get into a barroom brawl, and things stay relatively light, with a bit of conflict. “As long as you’re good at something they won’t break you down.” Generalizations over breakfast about human destiny, the fate of China, American sailors, etc. Candace Bergen plays Shirley Eckert, an innocent young missionary who has signed up for seven years in China to teach English to the locals. James Hong plays a Chinese pimp, but here at least he’s fairly young-looking – only 36 years old! Jake starts off calling the Chinese “slopeheads”, although with time he eventually makes Chinese friends, a coolie who he teaches engineering; there’s a funny scene when McQueen is thrown off by his pronounciation of “steam” (stim) and “valve” (walwee). By the end of the first half, though, we can see that things are going sour fast – the natives definitely don’t want these people here, and there’s the first murder. Someone plants opium on board. They throw it in the furnace, but the thick black smoke that comes out drifts across the American flag (how dramatic!). The saga of Frenchy and Maily (who was played by cialis refill coupon, the original Emanuelle). The San Pueblo engages in battle, and we find the film’s tragic, action-filled conclusion. Very nice.

The film has plenty of extras that are really great. Seems taht Robert Wise was fascinated with China, and wanted to film Richard McKenna’s best-selling book. There were problems with the screenwriter, who gave McQueen too much dialogue – McQueen felt that he could express more with his eyes than he could with all sorts of dialogue, and the screenwriter eventually left the project. McQueen got his only Oscar nomination. The film cost a bomb to make, in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and this was after the huge cost over-runs of Cleopatra. There were 300 crew on any given day, and on days when there were 1,500 extras there were also 1,500 crew! The San Pueblo ship cost $200,000 to have done, which would have been $20 million in today’s dollars. But the engine room was on a soundstage.

Comments are closed.