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Released
1966 · FILM

The Sand Pebbles

Rebellious Navy engineer Jake Holman fights to keep the gunboat USS San Pablo afloat amid a volatile Chinese uprising, where his defiance of rigid command and the ship’s fraught foreign‑Chinese relations threatens both crew and mission.

“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.”

Directed by
Robert Wise
Written by
Richard Mckenna, Robert Anderson
Runtime
196 min
AdventureDramaRomance
Streaming on
  • Paramount+

Synopsis

Engineer Jake Holman arrives aboard the gunboat USS San Pablo, which is tasked with patrolling a tributary of the Yangtze in 1926, a time of exploitation and revolution in China. His iconoclasm and cynical attitude quickly come into conflict with the "rice-bowl" system that governs the ship and the delicate relationship between Chinese and foreign personnel on the river. Tensions over the gunboat's presence escalate when it is forced to break through a river-boom to rescue missionaries stationed at the China Light Mission upriver.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Production Designer
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 22

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by William ReynoldsShot by Joseph MacdonaldScored by Jerry GoldsmithDesigned by Boris Leven

Box Office

1966 · Box office

⚖️ Fell short of break-even — grossed 1.7× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$20.0M

Budget$12.0M
Worldwide gross$20.0M
break-even (2.5×)

Also known as

  • Kanonenboot am Yangtse-Kiangde
  • La Canonnière du Yang-Tsefr
  • Quelli della San Pabloit

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