The Sand Pebbles

The Sand Pebbles (1966) is an American war drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Robert Wise and anchored by Steve McQueen's only career Oscar nomination. Shot on location in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the film puts its cast on the Yangtze River in 1926 — a country fracturing under revolutionary pressure, a gunboat that no longer belongs.

Machinist Mate Jake Holman (McQueen) joins the USS San Pablo wanting nothing beyond his engine room. The ship's "rice-bowl" arrangement — Chinese crew members doing the labor while Americans supervise — strikes him as absurd, so he starts doing the work himself. That choice upsets a delicate balance nobody had bothered to examine, and the consequences unspool slowly across nearly three and a half hours. Richard Attenborough, Richard Crenna and Candice Bergen fill out the core cast.

Robert Wise had just come off West Side Story and The Sound of Music; this was the turn in the other direction — long, morally uncomfortable, unresolved. The tagline called it "the sleeping dragon of savage China," but the real subject is a man too stubborn for the politics around him and too decent to stay out of the way. Stream The Sand Pebbles (1966) online on iFILM.