The Sand Pebbles
“This is the heroic story of the men on the U.S.S. San Pablo who disturbed the sleeping dragon of savage China as the threatened world watched in breathless terror.”
1966 · 3 h 2 min
Directed by 
Robert Wise
Robert WiseCast
Cast not recorded here
Plot
An engineer assigned to a US gunboat on the Yangtze in 1926 China is caught up in revolution and a doomed romance.
Sinekatalog’s take
Robert Wise's epic is long and ambitious, with Steve McQueen's Oscar-nominated performance, a serious anti-imperialist drama.Sinekatalog’s own editorial review – not a user or critic quote.
Ratings
IMDb: 7.5 / 10 (18,070 votes)
IMDb rating and vote count from the IMDb ratings dataset (October 2026). Scores change over time.