The Chairman (1969)

From my favorite movies..

Absolutely amazing

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

THE CHAIRMAN is an acceptable spy thriller of the late '60s, chiefly of interest for featuring a Western look at Mao-dominated communist China of the era. The story is slim and sees Gregory Peck jetting off to China to capture the usual MacGuffin, which is the formula for an enzyme which can dramatically increase farming yields. It's rather long-winded, with too many cutbacks to the guys at base who commentate and slow down the action, but the depiction of China is engaging and the presence of Mao himself in the character list makes this fun. Peck is reliably good, as ever, and there are plenty of familiar faces in the forms of Keye Luke, Ric Young, Burt Kwouk, Zienia Merton, and a cameoing Anne Heywood.

The Chairman is a film of its time, it was made when the Sino-Soviet split was just coming to the fore, when even the Russians were getting worried about their ally south of their Asian border. It's not hard to figure out, China is big, but very full, Siberia is big and very empty. Geography even trumps politics and ideology.Back in those days we still were not giving diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China. In fact you search the stories about China back in those days and it will inevitably be called Red China. You haven't heard that expression in a couple of decades now. So getting an American scientist for whatever reason in the country, was difficult if not impossible. Remember this was also the days when the godhead figure of their revolution Mao Tse-Tung was doing a little ideological house cleaning with those fired up young people, his Red Guards who were scaring the world back then and with good reason. A Chinese scientist colleague of Gregory Peck's back in the day played by Keye Luke sends a letter to Peck most cryptic as it would have to have passed through censors. That triggers a little sky espionage where it is discovered that the Chinese are growing agricultural produce in places it shouldn't happen. Luke has discovered an enzyme to make it possible and with it the Chinese can get starving third world nations to its side by the droves. It's got the US and the USSR worried.Peck's mission should he accept it is to get the formula for that enzyme out of China, not so easy for an Occidental, but he's the only guy with scientific qualifications for the job. The plot is somewhat similar in this respect to Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain.Oh, and they've got a real joker in the deck. Cold War Air Force general Arthur Hill who is running the show has implanted a listening device in Peck's skull so he can just talk and a spy satellite above China will pick it up and transmit. But they also have it rigged with an explosive device so Peck won't fall in enemy hands. And they don't tell him about that, cute.The Chairman is a good spy thriller with the action going along at a good clip. His race for the Soviet border will keep your adrenalin pumping the way Peck's character had to have been in the film. Best scene in the film is Peck's audience with Chairman Mao played by Conrad Yama. That was considerable license because Mao spoke no English.What I always found fascinating is that when Mao died in 1977 the revolution as he conceived it stopped with him. Today China, no longer called Red China, is your very typical oligarchic country that has restricted freedoms to be sure as the kids who were at Tiannamen Square will testify, but a country playing very typical power politics in the old fashioned way. My God they even have a stock exchange for capitalists. What would those idealistic young Red Guards think along with the man who inspired them?

Gregory Peck does a reasonably good job as a Nobelist who is sent to China to steal an enzyme that will increase the world's food supply. The Chinese, you see, want to keep it a secret and use it themselves. (They've since given up hoping for miracles and have turned to a much more sensible one-child per family policy.) I guess -- legally speaking, the enzyme IS in fact a Chinese invention and belongs to them, doesn't it? What I mean is, is it entirely ethical for Peck to sneak into China under false pretenses, swipe something of theirs, and smuggle it out of the country? After all, when the Americans and Brits get the enzyme at the end, they too stash it away to use as a "weapon" instead of handing it over to all humankind, as Peck wants to do. It's like Clint Eastwood sneaking into the USSR and stealing the most advanced fighter airplane in the world from them ("Firefox").Problems like this don't bother the film makers. Absconding with the MacGuffin is a good idea -- period. To show how good it is, even the Russians are on our side and only the Chinese are "enemies." And how does our side show its appreciation for Peck's life-endangering efforts? They have planted a complex transmitter in his mastoid sinus. He has willingly allowed them to do it. What they haven't told him is that there is a coil of explosive wrapped around the chip that will blow his head off if detonated by the authorities. At the last minute, the general in charge (Arthur Hill) relents and doesn't explode Peck's head. That's gratitude for you.The director has tried to turn this into a light-hearted thriller, along the lines of "North by Northwest." Accordingly, we are introduced to Chairman Mao while he's playing ping pong. And Peck is given plenty of wisecracks under stress, on top of which his performance is sort of sing-song, more animated than usual. Somehow it doesn't jell.It would have been no trouble at all in 1943 to change a few things around and have this turn out to be an anti-Nazi war film, all cloak and dagger, shadows and fog, and racing black sedans.Not one of Peck's better career choices.

Gregory Peck is a scientist. He is sent on a mysterious mission to China, where it turns out a scientist has developed an amazingly beneficial enzyme, and thinks Peck is the only man who can work out how to duplicate it for mass production, cure all known diseases, etc. Peck and said scientist are idealists who want to share it with the world, while the US and Chinese governments just want it for themselves. And, to make the whole thing more credible, Peck is equipped with a micro-transmitter in his brain which monitors his physical status and bugs his every conversation, including the one he has after playing table tennis with Chairman Mao.It sounds silly, and, frankly, it is, but the espionage and the attempts to detect it are fairly tense, and Gregory Peck indulges in a fair number of good old humanitarian rants which suggest that Chinese totalitarianism and US militarism aren't necessarily wonderful things either.I rather enjoyed it.