A three-hour tour

I've had The Sand Pebbles on my DVR for quite some time, but I've been a bit reluctant to sit down and watch three-hour movies. Recently, I finally made the time to sit down and watch it to do a review on here.

Steve McQueen plays Jake Holman, a Petty officer in the US Navy in 1926. It's a time when there's no real war going on, but there's still enough adventure abroad for people who want it, and Holman didn't have much choice, having been given the choice of the military or reform school when he was about 18. Being from an interior part of the States, he picked the Navy, and has now wound up being transferred to a ship called the USS San Pablo, whose job it is to assist with the defense of American citizens in China, which is in tumultuous days.

This is still five or so years before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, but there's still the sort of civil war and warlords things going on that were a staple of 1930s movies that tried to be exotic, like Shanghai Express or The Bitter Tea of General Yen, with the big difference here being that it's a movie about the Navy and not the Marines or even really about the locals. Anyhow, among the Americans are an older missionary, Jameson (Larry Gates), as well as a young woman about to do the missionary thing herself, Shirley Eckert (Candice Bergen). Holman meets both of them just before boarding the San Pablo, and they're going to go up river to where their mission is.

On the San Pablo, the captain, Lt. Collins (Richard Crenna), has a bit of a hard time of it because there's not much of a navy out on the Yangtze River and there are a lot of Chinese to deal with. Indeed, there's a sort of symbiotic, if definitely not by-the-book relationship between the men on the ship and some of the Chinese in that they do a bunch of the jobs that would normally be done by the crew, with this being easier for the crew but also probably making it less likely that the Nationalist army would attack them. Holman sees all this and is horrified by it since it's probably the sort of thing that would lead the San Pablo to become the rickety boat that it is.

One of the few people on the San Pablo who becomes a friend of Holman's is Frenchy (Richard Attenborough). He's met a Chinese prostitute, Maily, and has fallen in love with her. But she's in debt to her pimp, and when Frenchy tries to pay off those debts, he finds there's a civilian westerner who wants Maily too.

Along the way, the San Pablo gets involved in multiple skirmishes with the Chinese, who at one point besiege the boat during the winter season, before a climax of having to go to that mission and save Jameson and Eckert, who don't really want to be saved despite what the Nationalists are going to do to them.

As I said at the top, The Sand Pebbles runs just about three hours, and boy does that show. It's a well-acted movie, and in terms of the technical production it's the sort of high-quality movie that you can see why it got so many Oscar nominations, but at the same time, why id din't win any of those. It's extremely leisurely, and there's really not a whole lot going on as it feels as much episodic as it does a fully-plotted movie.

Still, there are definitely going to be people who like The Sand Pebbles for its performances, so it's definitely worth a watch, if you're willing to sit down and watch a three-hour movie.