Customer Reviews

The Chairman

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Arriving on DVD for the first time on Nov. 7 is the Gregory Peck movie "The Chairman." In it Peck plays a scientist who must travel to China to steal a top-secret formula. It's a fast-paced movie that manages to successfully balance post-cultural Revolution China politics, and the cultural divide between East and the West. The final moments as Peck's character attempts to flee over the Chinese border with Russia are filled with tension and excitement.
This release includes a rather unusual special feature. Running at 17:32 is a mini-version of the movie using deleted and alternate scenes. It's actually very well done and managed to touch on the majority of key plot points from the full running time version of 98 minutes.
There are also two deleted scenes taken from the International version of the movie. Neither adds much to the overall movie and parents should beware, the second deleted scene contains female nudity.
Arguably the lead special feature for "The Chairman" is an audio commentary conducted by film historians Eddie Friedfeld and Lee Pfeiffer. The two are obviously good friends (both being professors at NYU) and the commentary is very academic in tone, but still engaging. They begin by framing the movie in the context of the Cold War. Other key points in the commentary include discussions on the symbolism in the movie and standards of the spy genre. Included is a discussion of geopolitics specifically the tension between Russia and China as "The Chairman" sees the United States and Soviet Union join forces against the Chinese. They also commend the Jerry Goldsmith score and Pfeiffer (a well known and respected 007 fan) comments how the actress playing the Chinese stewardesses on the plane who just happens to be a spy also played a stewardess on a plane who just happened to be a spy in 1964's "Goldfinger."
These Nov. 7 releases from Fox contains trailers for several other movies, of varying quality. The trailers for "The Chairman" for example include not just the one for the feature, but also for "Our Man Flint," "In Like Flint," "The Quiller Memorandum," "Deadfall," "The Magus" and "Peeper." As might be expected however the trailers do show their age, and not always gracefully.
Also included is a quite in-depth collectible booklet.
Recommended.

Well it is not entirely an epic but it certainly is bizarre. This film has great potential as a somewhat conventional spy film with a few experimental eavesdropping gadgets thrown in for good measure. Yet director J. Lee Thompson puts his own distinctive stamp on it making it a frenzied and often unsettling kaleidoscopic affair. It is taut, suspenseful and often defies credibility and that is what makes it so much fun and very entertaining. Gregory Peck and Arthur Hill are as stoic as ever and it is good to see actress Anne Heywood show up in this film. One of the highlights of this film is Jerry Goldsmith's incredible score. It is amazing how he intuitively puts such great effort at times into modest production's that aspire or beg for some added dimension to enhance the film. In all this is a very interesting and entertaining look at China during the height of the Cold War era. Great packaging on this DVD by the way.

The Chairman (aka The Most Dangerous Man in the World) starts off with an amazing photomontage title sequence by Paul Brown Constable dealing with overpopulation and the rise of the Red Guard in Mao's China accompanied by the increasingly strident tones of Jerry Goldsmith's superb score that sets the scene for a much better film than you get. Any hope of a serious political thriller is quickly lost as soon as Arthur Hill's cycloptic general turns up and it turns out the bug implanted in Gregory Peck's skull is also a bomb. What you get instead is a fairly glossy, fashionably cynical shot-on-location thriller that briefly touches on humanistic issues in a couple of scenes before getting back to the spy stuff that's neither James Bond nor John Le Carre but pure Hollywood hokum in the 60s mould. Ironically, although the producers harboured the notion of filming in China in a monumental fit of delusion, it was the Hong Kong and Taiwanese authorities that really objected to the subject matter (as either too defamatory or deferential to Mao as the prevailing mood would have it). J. Lee Thompson's direction is occasionally visually ambitious, but seems to have suffered in the editing, with several very obvious edits to alternate takes interrupting what were clearly intended as continuous camera moves. It's a shame that Fox's DVD is the US version, relegating the racier scenes to the extra features - who'd have thought there'd ever be a movie with Gregory Peck having his trousers undone by a naked woman on her knees?

Fox have done an excellent job on this DVD - aside from a good 2.35:1 transfer and trailer, it also includes two alternate scenes and a 17-minute promotional cutdown of the feature (clearly put together before the climax was shot and featuring Burt Kwouk's own voice - in the feature he's dubbed by Robert Rietty) that includes some deleted footage. There's also a historical audio commentary that could have benefitted from a little more time in the archives and a selection of trailers for other recent Fox titles such as The Quiller Memorandum, the Flint films and Deadfall.

I can't think of another thriller where a living world leader was depicted onscreen, not using stock footage like Day of the Jackal or Hennessey, but by an actor. Perhaps that's why this film vanished for decades. (Or that may have been due to the hero's humanist impulses.) In any event, this is still worth watching and the picture looks great on the DVD.
The commentary track is the same guys as several of these 60s era thrillers and they do a good job. (Although a fair amount of time is taken up instructing us that Mao was a bad guy.) But they also seem to think the picture's scenes set in China are documentary evidence of the country at the time and not, in fact a Western entertainment's take on it. (As they tell us themselves -- some of this footage was shot in Scotland!)

It was great to see this film get the five star treatment it deserves. The deleted scenes, especially the ones for 'overseas' countries are fantastic. The audio commentary is both informative and entertaining.
A must have DVD for any fan of 60s cinema and Gregory Peck. Now if only Fox will release Hard Contract (1969) with James Coburn...

Gregory Peck was without peer as a convincing actor who always brought something special to every role he played.

Here, he was a renowned scientist, pretending to know more about hybrid plant species than he did. This helped him in a role of deception so that he could unlock a secret from an enemy (Red-China) that would neutralize their ability to have an undue and unbelievable influence on third world nations struggling to feed themselves.

What Peck's character did not know was that people in his own governmment,(the USA) were not telling him everything about his covert mission and what he did not know could have killed him.

An exciting film about a very nervous time in our recent history.

In 1969, Red China was a dark and mysterious place, closed to the outside world, in the grip of the cultural revolution, and run by the charismatic Mao, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. When American scientist and Nobel Prize winner John Hathaway receives a letter from a former mentor now living in China, he is asked by his government to make a visit. His old teacher may have invented an enzyme that allows crops to be grown anywhere.

Gregory Peck is gruffly realistic as Hathaway, scientist and aging former intelligence asset. His handler is a General Shelby, played with bureaucratic starchiness by Arthur Hill. Shelby, at the head of a combined US, British, and Soviet operation, dispatches Hathaway into China with a micro-transmitter emplanted in his head.

Upon arrival in China, Hathaway is graced by an audience with the Chairman himself, an intriguing political set-piece. Hathaway finds his mentor in a remote rural compound near the Russian border, where the old man is under siege by the fanatical Red Guard. When Hathaway suspects Chinese security is closing in, he will make a try for the enzyme formula and a break for the border. The thrilling escape sequence is made all the more suspenseful for the audience by the knowledge, not shared by Hathaway, that Shelby will not let his agent be taken alive.

The Cold War theatrical effects of "The Chairman" look slightly overdone at this distance of time, as does the effort to portray Hathaway as both spy and humanitarian. However, the location shooting in China is grittily authentic and recreates the claustrophobic atmosphere of a revolution out of control. The Chairman's meeting with Hathaway is stagey but contains a key philosphical point. Hathaway's escape attempt holds up extremely well as a thrilling action sequence. "The Chairman" is therefore highly recommended as a dated but still worthwhile Cold War thriller.

We are in the middle of the cold war. Too bad because we ar also victims of increasing population and decreasing farmland.

Looks like Professor Soong Li (Keye Luke, of Charlie Chan fame) has invented an enzyme to produce extra cheap food. Unfortunately he is behind the iron curtain in Red China. The formula cannot come out so someone capable of understanding it must go in; Dr. John Hathaway (Gregory Peck) a scientist with scruples.

Naturedly incase he can not get out they fitted his head with a micro-transmitter so he could relay the formula. They seem to have forgotten to tell him the transmitter was also a bomb large enough to take out anyone standing near.

We see how ruthless and conniving the red's are and how they humiliate Soong Li for being a professor.

Should we take revenge and a perfect opportunity as Dr. John Hathaway stands next to the Chairman (Conrad Yama?)

The Chairman is a cold war drama and thriller,Gregory Peck plays a scientist who receives a letter from and old friend in China about an enzyne that might help a starving world,but he would have to go to China to bring it out.The military puts a tracker in his head to track his movements,but he doesn"t know that a explosive device is built into it.Greg goes to China and gets to meet the Chairman,and it goes from there,The movie was filmed in Ireland but who would know that but the people in it,overall not great film but it keeps you involved and some nice action stuff and explosions to wake you up at the end.

This movie opens with a sophistocated collage of images from the Chinese communist revolution that is beautifully done with a great musical score that anticipates a viable political thriller. What you get is bad science, stiff scripted acting, hokey special effects (including lots of sliding doors, secreted phones, physiologic monitors that looked like bad Monopoly game spinners and oscilloscopes with crazy impossible uses) and I shouldn't forget a long painful goofy ending. I was expecting an Atticus Finch class CIA operative out of Gregory Peck, what we get is Peck as a sometimes interesting moralist, supposed Nobel Prize winner who can't pronounce his amino acids and who praises another scientist for her work on peptides (like praising Albert Einstein for that nuclear stuff) and a bad James Bond like character who tosses the adoring girls aside as they get in his way. The plot line is poorly thought out and leads to a predictable and unbelievable conclusion with lots of slow crawling through the Highlands of Scotland, meant to be the Russo-Chinese border and what was with the Russians firing mortars at the Chinese to protect Peck. It could have been so much more- The character did not have to be a Nobel prize winner, he could have secreted into China,developed a fondness for the locals and their struggle to survive, met the scientist with the secret enzyme and collaborated on completing the production to benefit all people and ended with a military style nighttime extraction from China. We didn't need the constant "on" microphone planted in his head for everyone at "headquarters" to listen to every sound and word over the loadspeakers. Beside the fact it was miniaturized cell phone type technology that barely exists today and not even close in 1969 and where in the tiny device implanted in his mastoid was there enough room for plastic explosive and a detonator and what was the means of detonation. After Mockingbird where he could do no wrong, this was certainly a big let down from Peck and the production crew of The Chairman.