Film · 1966 · Films · 1960s
The Sand Pebbles
Scored from 121 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
In 1926 Jake Holman, a US Navy machinist's mate who prefers engines to people, is posted to the USS San Pablo, an ageing gunboat patrolling the Yangtze to guard American interests in a China convulsed by civil war and rising anti-foreign feeling. Holman antagonises the crew by insisting on running the engine room himself instead of leaving it to the Chinese labourers the ship keeps aboard, and he trains one of them, Po-han, as his assistant. Ashore he meets Shirley Eckert, a young American missionary teacher, as the gunboat's position on the river grows steadily less tenable. Robert Wise directed this roadshow-length drama starring Steve McQueen, with Richard Attenborough and Richard Crenna.
Released in 1966, The Sand Pebbles is an adventure, drama and romance film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 3h 2m.
The calibrated figure is built from 121 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 122 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The Sand Pebbles lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1960s (1,929 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 121.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
