A week or so ago I did a swipe past Turner Classic Movies, ran across The Sand Pebbles (1966) with Steve McQueen, Candice Bergen and Richard Crenna, and recorded it for future viewing. The "future" turned out to be last night, it felt appropriate for Memorial Day weekend.
I'm sure I saw the film when it came out, but who remembers every film they saw almost 70 years ago? The film is set somewhere upriver from Shanghai, but was filmed in still-British Hong Kong and Taiwan.
There was no CGI in those days, and the settings look very "right" for the time and place. It featured a very young Candice Bergen, I'd forgotten what a classically beautiful young woman she was.
Steve McQueen played an engineering mate whose specialty was steam engines, which he took very seriously. He'd come from a squared away headquarters ship, and found the USS San Pablo, aka Sand Pebbles, had more or less "gone native" with the Captain's acquiescence. Trouble ensued.
Colonial powers, including the US, truly did have gunboats on the rivers of China protecting their interests and their missionaries. You hear stories about "China Marines" and the warlord battles of the time. My dad's older brother - a young Army lieutenant - did garrison duty in the Philippines, a then-colony of the US. It was a colorful era. One progressive Americans prefer to forget, or disparage, if reminded.
Sand Pebbles is a good film without the typical Hollywood "happy ending." It is fiction set in a real piece of US military history, even if that history was 6000 miles offshore.
