268 SAND PEBBLES, THE
adventure on the grand scale” (Scheuer, 1966). Richard Schickel found The Sand
Pebbles to be “a clumsy and lumbering film, but it has a way of haunting the cor-
ners of your mind, as historical footnotes are sometimes wont to do” (Schickel,
1967). Many reviewers complained about the film’s sheer length; at 3 hours it was
judged too long to be consistently engaging.Reel History Versus Real History
Having served in the China River Patrol in 1936, novelist Richard McKenna
brought a good deal of authenticity to The Sand Pebbles in his rendition of daily
life on an American gunboat plying the waters of the Yangtze River in pre-
revolutionary China. The novel is set between June 1925 and June 1926, whereas
the film is set in 1926–1927, but both settings encompass a particularly volatile
moment in China’s modern history: a time when the country was a powder keg,
seething with anti- imperialist ardor and internecine po liti cal conflict. During the
setting of the novel, the Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist Party of China) was in
the throes of a power vacuum following the death of its founder, Sun Yat- sen, in
March 1925. On 5 June 1926 Chiang Kai- shek was named commander- in- chief
of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA). Five weeks later he fi nally launched
Sun’s long- delayed Northern Expedition, aimed at conquering the northern war-
lords and uniting China under the KMT. Chiang disapproved of Sun Yat- sen’s
alliance with the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of China (CPC) but he
still needed Soviet aid, so he could not break up the alliance at that time. The
film shifts the novel’s temporal framework forward about a year and distills and
streamlines McKenna’s fictional saga, but still manages to capture the po liti cally
explosive po liti cal climate, an uneasy time for gunboats of foreign powers on the
Yangtze, with their very presence stirring intense resentment among Chinese
nationalists and communists sick and tired of “gunboat diplomacy,” that is,
thinly disguised imperialist intervention. The culminating attack on the USS San
Pablo may have been inspired by the so- called “USS Panay incident” (12 Decem-
ber 1937), when Japa nese forces invading China bombed, strafed, and sank a
U.S. gunboat on the Yangtze River, killing 3 and wounding 43, a sinking that
caused a diplomatic rift between the United States and Japan and presaged Pearl
Harbor. The plot ele ment involving the killing of missionary Jameson at China
Light Mission may have been inspired by the killing of American Christian mis-
sionaries John and Betty Stam (8 December 1934) by Chinese communists dur-
ing the Chinese Civil War. Another pos si ble antecedent: the “China Martyrs of
1900”: hundreds of American and Eu ro pean Christian missionaries and converts
who were killed during the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901). One final note: a num-
ber of film critics erroneously assumed that The Sand Pebbles was meant to be an
implicit critique of American intervention in Southeast Asia— the Vietnam War
was in full swing when the film came out at the end of 1966— but that was never
Richard McKenna’s intention when he published the book in 1962, or the intention
of the filmmakers four years later.