Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1966

The Contenders:

Alfie
A Man for All Seasons (winner)
The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming
The Sand Pebbles
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1966

The Contenders:

Michael Caine: Alfie
Paul Scofield: A Man for All Seasons (winner)
Alan Arkin: The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming
Steve McQueen: The Sand Pebbles
Richard Burton: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The Sand Pebbles

Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I have come to realize that a lot of the films I’ve been watching lately are extremely short. I do plan to watch everything on these lists, but watching too many short films leaves me in a position of only having the longest films left. When I did the 1001 List, I made it a point to watch a few of the longest films on the list I had left every month. It worked then and it should work now. With that in mind, it made sense to watch one of the longest films I could get hold of today in The Sand Pebbles, a very unusual war film and a very long one.

This is a very strange war film in that it takes place between World War I and II. In a real sense, it’s not an actual war film because there isn’t a great deal of war that happens with the main characters of the film. We start with machinist mate 1st class Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) who is in Shanghai attempting to get to his new ship, an ancient gunboat called the San Pablo, nicknamed the Sand Pebble by the crew. The ship is an American presence in China, where a great deal of trouble is brewing. The country is torn apart by factions, predominantly the Nationalists and the communists. Holman finds his ship and discovers a few important points.