Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [72]
While Western governments remained officially neutral, waiting to see which side would win the Chinese civil war, Western navies patrolled the Taiwan Strait and the strategically crucial Yangtze River with warships and gunboats, with orders not to intervene or commit any acts of aggression unless directly attacked.
The San Pueblo, known to the Chinese as the “Sand Pebbles,” was an aging gunboat, typical of 1920s American naval patrol vessels, that was assigned to the area. The story of what happens to its captain, crew, and chief engineer is the heart of both the book and the film.2 The captain, played to paranoid perfection by Richard Crenna in a performance that owes much to Bogart’s Captain Queeg in Edward Dmytryk’s 1954 The Caine Mutiny, eventually draws his men into a brutal confrontation with a small group of Chinese Nationalists in a show of strength intended to ignite his crew’s war lust (and enhance the reputation he hoped to build as the man who brought America into and helped end the Chinese civil war). To do so, he orders his ship to head up the Yangtze to the China Light Mission to save the lives of several stranded American missionaries.
Here the film foreshadows Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 1979’s Apocalypse Now.3 In both films, a ship’s attempt to go upstream—against the physical, cultural, emotional, and historical tide—affects each of the men aboard, none more than Jake Holman (Steve), the quintessential career sailor who by the film’s end becomes not merely a gallant hero but a sacrificial savior, giving up his own life to let others live. During the film, Holman learns to respect the lives of the Chinese coolies who work without pay in his engine room and of the Chinese women exploited by the sailors on leave, and he comes to see the hypocrisy of fighting a war nobody except the captain wants—“the insanity of killing for flags,” as he puts it, and the futility of trying to drop out of the system rather than continuing to fight for it.
In the novel, and even more so in the film, the relevance or “heat” of the story has little if anything to do directly with the Chinese civil war. However, as a clear and powerful allegory to what was happening in Vietnam and the feeling among many Americans that the country was being drawn by its leaders into a war in Asia that had nothing to do with America, the novel became a huge bestseller and the subsequent film one of the most powerful antiwar movies ever to come out of mainstream Hollywood. (Holman’s—whole man’s?—final words are “I was home, how did this happen?”) The studio system was in its last throes, and the Production Code, which dictated the sociological and moral content of film, would soon be replaced by the less restrictive ratings system, but the fact that The Sand Pebbles, one of the most progressive and therefore subversive mainstream American films, was made at all is a remarkable achievement.
The film’s Holman was a perfect fictional counterpart for Steve. According to Fox studio head Tom Rothman, “Look at the parallels between Jake Holman and Steve McQueen. Both were in the military; Holman is in the navy, Steve was in the marines, and both used the military as a form of escape from a troubled life. Both loved machinery. Both were loners, and in one lucid moment, Holman tells beautiful missionary Shirley Eckert [Candice Bergen] about his mother, saying his mother didn’t count for much but was a good dame.”
Holman is a man of few words; McQueen, too, was someone whose words in real life were few and precise. On-screen, reaching back to his Method training, Steve practiced the mantra “Acting is doing,” not saying, as a way to avoid having to recite what he felt were a lot of unnecessary lines. Throughout the filming, Steve was constantly pushing Anderson (indirectly, through Wise), to reduce his lines and to let the camera tell the story.
Holman finds comfort in machinery; so did