The Chairman
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DVD Cover Information Actor: Alan Dobie, Anne Heywood, Arthur Hill, Conrad Yama, Gregory Peck Director: J. Lee Thompson Brand: Fox Cinematographer: John Wilcox Cinematographer: Ted Moore Producer: Arthur P. Jacobs Producer: Mort Abrahams Producer: Pepi Lenzi Writer: Ben Maddow Writer: Jay Richard Kennedy DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0 Format: Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen Picture Format: 2.35:1 Running Time: 93 minutes Published: 2006-11-01 DVD Release Date: 2006-11-07 Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Studio: 20th Century Fox |
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Movie Reviews of The Chairman
Movie Review: Not exactly a bomb but certainly no classic
Summary: 3 Stars
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.