You watch this movie and wonder at a bygone age where a three-hour story about a gunboat patrolling the Yangtse in 1926, featuring only a couple of token female performances, would get greenlit. And we today are missing out as a result - this is moviemaking at its swaggering, unreconstructed best. The language used by the sailors and the racist epithets employed are no doubt accurate, toned down even. The depiction of the "So sollee!" Chinese is very 1960s, but that aside, this is very strong meat. We have a Chinese worker eaten by the cogs of the boat's engine, another Chinese crew member strung up and graphically tortured by a baying mob, a young prostitute humiliated in front of, you guessed it, a baying mob, intoning "Strip her! Strip her!" and a crew of mutinous swabs chanting for Steve McQueen's character, Holman, to hand himself over to the Chinese for lynching to save THEIR necks.
The three hours fly by as this old fashioned yarn (with some political exposition) unfolds. McQueen, always a wooden but "man's man" presence, is wonderful and is given good support (Candice Bergen is given very little to do, though Emmanuelle Arsan, author of the Emmanuelle novels, as the local prostitute, gives an affecting performance). Richard Attenborough's accent keeps wandering between the Bronx and Kensington in one of his less convincing performances.
From an era when That Darn Cat and Fantastic Voyage were more representative of the cinema of the day, this is proper, grown-up movie making - creakily showing its age at times, but with a quality and authenticity that will endure.
Review of The Sand Pebbles
