Movie Reviews for The Chairman

The Chairman

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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.

Movie Review: Curious Film - Long Unavailable
Summary: 3 Stars

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!)

Movie Review: MY WILD IRISH CHINA.
Summary: 3 Stars

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.

Movie Review: Chairman Mao Let down.
Summary: 2 Stars

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.