"I couldn't make the slightest movement. I stood, or rather hung, suspended, in a bed of air, all of one piece with my metal shell."-- Solaris, Bill Johnston translation, location 21
What about McQueen? What about it? Minimalist, strong silent type, Maggie Q isn't a jack off rave either in her attempt to leave us hand wringing. Good little bad girl. Bad bigger good Jake with the finger of divine discipline on him, with the future Murphy Brown reeking the vestigial horror of rape as a war crime. Everyone knows the faces of Mako and James Hong as the standard character actors of ethnic diabolical impurity and compliant good intentions, illustrated by Attenborough's Frenchie; it is not simply love of Maily which drives the second mate. He wants to achieve bourgeoisie status at a bargain basement rate. He pays with malaria or dysentery and leaves his Eurasian sweet meat to die like a dog getting its skull fractured for a stew. The Sand Pebbles has an affinity with the equally commercial Sho gun of moral turpitude, homo sociability of unintended consequences as a result of the peasant caste system which Jake challenges through individualism and the love of being a journeyman in and of itself. Linda Lee Cadwell's exotic romance may not have been tinctured with this studio saga of the forbidden, but its real life tragedy had the same vitiating result.
Am I against multicultural fusion? Not at all. Pragmatic reality is another matter. My argument is that Crenna unexpectedly steals the film in his last twenty minutes of shooting, despite McQueen's abscess and his sickened sacrifice. A possible trigger for his mesothelioma? Feverish, pneumatic runs, hungry and not eating. Dry toast?
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