OVP: The Sand Pebbles (1966)

Film: The Sand Pebbles (1966)
Stars: Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, Richard Crenna, Candice Bergen, Marayat Andriane, Mako
Director: Robert Wise
Oscar History: 8 nominations (Best Picture, Actor-Steve McQueen, Supporting Actor-Mako, Art Direction, Cinematography, Film Editing, Score, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

This week we've covered four screen legends for the Best Actor field (John Travolta, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, & Cary Grant), but today as we wind down our Best Actor tribute, we're going to pick a fifth legend, but one with two distinctions from this group.  The first is that despite a pretty robust film career before his early death, Steve McQueen only scored one Oscar nomination.  McQueen had other films that might have popped with Oscar if they'd been a bit more smitten with him (Love with a Proper Stranger, The Reivers, Papillon), but this was the only time Oscar went with the cinematic rebel, and they did it in (second distinction from this week's movies) a Best Picture nominee.  The Sand Pebbles is probably best-remembered in terms of Oscar for its Best Picture nomination, and that it is the rare film to win eight citations from AMPAS and not win a single one in the year where A Man for All Seasons and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were scooping up most of the trophies.  However, we'll try to frame it at least slightly from the Best Actor front today to go with our theme.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Sand Pebbles is a long movie, a proper three-hour epic, and thus we've got a plot to slice through, but I'll try to boil it down.  Essentially we have Jake Holman (McQueen) who is a rebellious maintenance officer in the United States Navy.  He is assigned to the USS San Pablo, nicknamed the "Sand Pebble" and thus the men on the ship are called the "Sand Pebbles."  The boat is  stationed in China in the 1920's, and they hire Chinese men as laborers on the ship to run the ship and do most of the manual work.  This doesn't fly with Holman, who takes over the engine room and instantly causes friction with the other men aboard the ship as a result, with the exception of Frenchy (Attenborough).  This continues as one of the Chinese men who had run the ship prior to Holman is killed in an accident due to Holman wanting to implement better maintenance onboard, and Holman has to hire an additional Chinese laborer Po-Han (Mako), whom he befriends, but their association costs Po-Han his life.  We continue to see increased tension between the Chinese and the Americans as the National Revolutionary Army begins to gain power, and in the end, it's obvious that the Americans are in over-their-head, as one-by-one pretty much every major Sand Pebble is killed as a result of the increasing tension with the Chinese.

There's a lot more to the plot than that, but I don't want to spend this whole article recapping rather than reviewing.  Let's start out with the acting, particularly McQueen's.  McQueen had an effortless cool onscreen in all of his roles (also, he was sexy as hell), which translates here, but in terms of heavy-lifting for his character, it kind of gets lost.  McQueen is watchable, but is a weird counter to the rest of the cast, ranging from the "ACTING!" being done by Richard Attenborough to the distinguished work of Richard Crenna's lieutenant (for my money, best in the cast) to Candice Bergen's "I'm going to under-emote as much as possible which you hopefully won't notice because I am so beautiful" role as the girlfriend (Bergen's role, in particular feels like exactly the kind that Oscar notices for some reason with pretty young actresses even when they don't really do much onscreen, and I'm kind of floored she wasn't nominated as a result).  As a result, McQueen's performance feels too strained, doesn't get enough background, and is out-of-kilter with the rest of the movie.

The movie itself is grand, and I'm a sucker for such things (I love a long movie if it gets a big enough payoff, which this movie does in the final moments), but it never really justifies its length.  The love story between McQueen & Bergen has zilch chemistry (I swear, I like Bergen as a rule, but this movie does nothing with her tenacity), and Attenborough seems to be more in love with his girlfriend's (Maily, a virgin who is wading into prostitution) situation than with herself.  The movie is good, but it never goes for great, and when you get a cast & crew that looks like this, great is what you should be expecting.

The other six nominations need their due before we close.  Mako's turn as Supporting Actor is instantly sympathetic, and one of the rare circumstances where an Asian actor was nominated by Oscar, but it's a misdirect as he has very little to do other than be sympathetic & someone to show a shift in McQueen's character.  His work here is unusual as Attenborough & Crenna both have bigger parts (Attenborough even won the Golden Globe), so it's cool such a small role won an Oscar nod, but it's pretty one-note even if it's physically demanding.  Mako's biggest scene in the movie is an intense boxing match that lasts a while, and while it's riveting/exhausting, it's also lensed in an unusual way that felt disjointed, which I can't decide to blame on either the editor (who could have trimmed half an hour from this movie & made everything sharper) or the cinematographer (who otherwise does brilliant work in the waters, especially as the San Pueblo attempts to fjord enemy lines late in the movie).  The Sound is strong, and does great things with quiet (rare for a war picture), especially the thrilling final showdown between McQueen and the NRA soldiers, and the Art Direction was fine, though occasionally feels too "filmy" (the bar/brothel looks so much like a blank movie set you half expect the men to start singing on the tables).  The best nomination, though, was the Score-which is breathtaking.  Jerry Goldsmith (one of my favorites) gives the film a haunting romance with his horns & strings that, quite frankly, the story never earns, but it's radiant stuff.