The Sand Pebbles
Starring: Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, Candice Bergen
Director: Robert Wise
The film: Shot mostly on location off Lantau island, Sai Kung and the Taiwanese port city of Keelung, The Sand Pebbles is based on the 1962 novel of the same name. Set in the mid-1920s, the story follows the crew of the US gunboat San Pablo up the Yangtze River from Shanghai, past the Treaty Ports of Hankow and Changsha in a film with more character development than plot. Engineer Steve McQueen is coaxed out of his shell by Candice Bergen, shipmate Richard Attenborough has a fatal relationship with a local girl, and there's trouble in store for a few missionaries. But much of the film's appeal is down to the extraordinary exterior sets. The reconstructed period Chinese towns and cities are more convincing than anything attempted in more recent films such as The White Countess (2005) or The Painted Veil (2006).
Several of the great Chinese-American character actors show up, notably James Hong (with more than 300 film credits and still going strong), Beulah Quo, Tommy Lee and Richard Loo, but the two main Chinese characters are played by Japanese and Thai actors. Japanese-born Mako (below with McQueen) later became a major figure in Asian-American theatre, co-founding the East West Players in LA with Hong and Quo. Attenborough's love interest is played by Eurasian Marayat Andriane.
Most of the action takes place on the San Pablo, a gunboat built by the Cheoy Lee shipyard in Hong Kong. Six months in the making, its launch was covered by local media. The extra features on this two-disc set show that event as well as footage of 1960s Hong Kong.