YMMV / The Sand Pebbles

• Adaptation Displacement: Richard McKenna's novel was a best-seller in its day but has long since been overshadowed by the film.
• Award Snub: Steve McQueen's performance is often considered his best (and he did receive an Oscar nomination), but he had the misfortune of competing against Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons and Richard Burton in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
• Fair for Its Day: While dated in some respects, The Sand Pebbles is progressive for its time in depicting an anti-Western rebellion in Asia in a complex and somewhat sympathetic light, and making no effort to defend or apologize for imperialism. The movie also deserves credit for casting all its Asian characters with Asian actors, even if a few (like the Japanese-American Mako) weren't ethnically Chinese, at a time when it wasn't uncommon for Hollywood films to cast Caucasian performers in yellow face.
• The Woobie: Maily and Po-Han.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: A film from the 1960s depicting American forces stuck in a quagmire in Asia? Robert Wise always denied a Vietnam connection (after all, the book was written in 1962, so it wouldn't make much sense to write a novel protesting American involvement in a war that America wasn't involved in yet) but critics then and now inevitably draw the comparison.

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