Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [73]
Holman is detached; we learn this from the very beginning when he is punished for his nonconformity by being transferred from a glamorous navy warship to a small, decidedly unglamorous gunboat. At the start of the film, then, Holman is physically separated from the mainstream and emotionally detached from authority.
This detachment is amplified when the other sailors on the ship take their leave at a local whorehouse. Holman chooses not to partake in any physical pleasures. He keeps himself apart from the action. Then his shipmate Frenchy (Richard Attenborough, with whom Steve had become friendly during the making of The Great Escape) falls in love with a beautiful Chinese prostitute (advertised as a virgin) and learns that if he can raise $200, he can buy her freedom and marry her. Holman decides to help Frenchy free the girl, a decision that begins Holman’s spiritual awakening. He soon befriends a Chinese coolie, an underdog with whom he identifies and whom he winds up mercy-killing, an act that haunts Holman throughout the rest of the film.
At the same time he meets one of the young missionaries, a beautiful white American girl named Shirley (Candice Bergen), and falls for her. He wants her, but doesn’t know how to have her. She is cold to his earthly advances because her commitment to God is unshakable. Soon enough, Holman begins to consider the possibility of joining her missionary work in China as a way of being with this beautiful but unattainable woman. Peace, to him, begins to make sense, while war becomes ever more meaningless.
Perhaps the most jarring element of all is the specter of death that hangs over Holman throughout the entire film. He is the Jonas of the ship, as his men call him. He is unpopular, and not long after his arrival, several deaths take place. Two coolies die; Frenchy dies when he attempts to desert to be with his bride; the captain dies trying to save the missionaries (who, ironically, don’t want to be saved); and finally, in a powerful final moment of bravery (and commitment), Holman sacrifices his life to save Shirley and the others from certain death at the hands of a murder squad sent by the Nationalists to kill the outsiders.
There was much meat on the bones of the character of Jake Holman, and Steve bit into it until, as the ancient belief goes, he ate the cow and inhaled its soul. Indeed, in this movie, more than any other, Steve became the character he was playing.
Or it became him. Either way, it was one of those memorable Method-actor performances where what is visible on-screen becomes the window to interior emotion, what is going on both inside the actor’s head and in the character’s world, rather than merely the reflection of an actor’s exterior.
After The Sand Pebbles and Steve McQueen’s hauntingly beautiful performance in it, his cinematic persona would never be the same. In this, his sixteenth picture, he would find his on-screen signature: a powerful, attractive, strong, unsmiling antihero. To this point, Hollywood had defined what a Steve McQueen hero should be like. After The Sand Pebbles, Steve McQueen defined what a Hollywood hero was.
And all because of a performance in a film that almost didn’t get made.
IN 1962 McKenna had been paid a hefty $300,000 for the film rights by Mirisch/UA, who intended to use it as a star vehicle for Paul Newman. However, not long after, UA, in yet another bout of financial disarray that had become business as usual for the production/distribution house, put the project in turnaround, where it was picked up by 20th Century Fox. Wise, who was the original director, remained with the project and still wanted to reteam with Newman, who almost said yes when he thought