I was going to post this review this weekend anyway, but now it takes on more of a valedictory tone:
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 – the best of them a literal and ideological ping pong game with Conrad Yama’s Chairman Mao - 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), with the film ending up in the same Welsh locations that had passed for China in
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness and
Satan Never Sleeps.
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, though he manages to get a surprising amount of tension out of the last couple of reels as Peck makes his unlikely action-packed dash for the Russian border (this being a combined US-UK-Russian operation). It’s a shame that, like Fox’s DVD, this is the US version (as are all worldwide home video releases), relegating the slightly 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?
It’s attained some historical interest in the past decade or so, and not just because of the scenes in a down and dirty Hong Kong before it was a neon city of skyscrapers or the presence of the industry’s then go-to Asian actors Keye Luke, Burt Kwouk (who is very obviously dubbed by Bond movie voiceover regular Robert Rietty but does get his big machine-gun toting grenade throwing action hero moment in this one), Ric Young and Anthony Chinn. With the Chinese box-office such an important part of Hollywood’s financial calculations, it’s simply inconceivable today that, even with the Chinese government carrying out genocidal policies against the Muslim population in Xinjiang, any major studio, or even a moderately well-funded independent, would make a film where the Red Chinese are clearly the villains and the ruthlessness of their political system openly criticised today.
With Disney apparently stopping all work on restoring Fox titles for the time being, the disc appears to use the same older transfer Fox used for their DVD, but there is a noticeable improvement in the quality – good enough to notice that the lovely Zienia Merton is wearing a body stocking in part of her deleted nude scene - and no ‘reimagining’ of the original colour scheme. TT have carried over the extras package from Fox’s special edition DVD – audio commentary by Eddie Friedfeld and Lee Pfeiffer, two racier deleted scenes from the international version (one explaining what the butterflies are doing in the bedroom scene), trailer (unfortunately with sound out of synch by a whopping 80 seconds!) and what is referred to as a 17-minute mini-movie but which is actually a show reel put together for exhibitors to get them to book the film and which features alternate takes and one additional deleted scene but which, unfortunately, is also slightly out of synch: so is the version on the DVD release, but not as noticeably. (It’s surprising Fox didn’t use this as the basis for a Super 8mm release in the 70s since other show reels like the 1979
Dracula,
Buck Rogers or
Capricorn One turned up on the format). Like the trailer, this seems to be the only instance of Nick Redman’s passing affecting a TT disc: he supervised the extra content, and as this was one of the label’s last releases it’s sadly understandable that the label’s quality control on the supplements dipped on this occasion. They’ve also added an isolated music and effects track for Goldsmith’s superb score - the original master tracks have long been lost or mislaid - and the usual booklet.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed this on a rewatch, but then it seems to be one of those films I blow hot and cold on depending on what kind of mood I'm in: I enjoyed it as a kid, was disappointed when I saw it again on DVD but found the hokum much more engaging this time. Your mileage may vary.
Incidentally, how's this wonderfully tacky Scanners-inspired UK VHS cover for taking the premise rather more literally than anything on screen?:
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