Steve McQueen was always a big favorite in our house when I was growing up, from ‘the Magificent Seven’ to 'The Great Escape’ to 'The Blob’, we just thought he was the ultimate in 'cool’. While this is a bit of a long drawn out movie with a lot more political message than we were really able to understand at the time, we were still drawn in by McQueen’s 'cool quotient’. I’ve been back to see it several times in the years since, and it still holds up pretty well, as the sort of Humphrey Bogart-ish 'I don’t wan’t to get involved’ type of storyline that they just don’t seem to make anymore. Big, and epic in scope, McQueen plays an engineer on a US Military steamboat on a river in China during the revolution. He takes under his wing a 'slopehead’ (as the chinese are called by the sailors) to help him run the engine room, and becomes emotionally attached to him. Various subplots ensue, involving a pretty missionary, played by Candace Bergen, a sailor/chinese girl romance featuring Richard Attenborough, all set against the backdrop of the bloody revolution taking place around them and the US orders to 'not let the chinese provoke us into an 'incident’.
This was probably one of those movies that I first became familiar with through the 'Mad Magazine parody’ that I discovered in my uncle’s stash of old 'Mad’s’, which led to my interest in it when it appeared on television.
