The Chairman (APJAC Productions, 20th Century-Fox, 1969)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 4) my husband Charles and I watched two movies, a Blu-Ray disc of The Chairman (1969) and a DVD of Crimson Tide (1995). I’d ordered these discs because I’ve been assigned to review their soundtrack albums for the May-June 2026 issue of Fanfare magazine, and they made an interesting double bill because both of them are about rivalries between the U.S. and nominally Communist or ex-Communist powers, China in The Chairman and Russia in Crimson Tide. Charles pronounced The Chairman as “a real relic of the Cold War,” and that it is, though the MacGuffin isn’t a nuclear secret but an artificial enzyme that will allow plants to grow even in ordinarily inhospitable soil and climate conditions. The enzyme was invented by Chinese scientist Soong Li (Keye Luke, a welcome sight). The American and British secret services hatch a plot to send Nobel Prize-winning American agronomist, scientist, and professor John Hathaway (Gregory Peck, top-billed) to infiltrate China and steal the formula for the enzyme. Hathaway is a widower who has an alternate Anglo love interest, British scientist and teacher Kay Hanna (Anne Heywood), but she’s only in two scenes: an early one in which she invites Hathaway to her class as a guest lecturer, and a tag scene in which they reunite after his Big Chinese Adventure. Since the film was made in 1969, Hathaway arrives in China just as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) was being launched by Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-Tung, as he was known then in the West), a movement Mao arbitrarily started in 1966 to upend all of Chinese society and keep the country going on the One True Path to socialism and eventually communism. As a result of this event, university professors were pulled out of their classrooms and forced to work in the fields doing farm labor, and gangs of free-lance thugs known as the Red Guards roamed through the streets beating up people who weren’t considered sufficiently devoted to the Chairman and his ideology. Mao published the so-called “Little Red Book,” whose full title was Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, which was issued to virtually all Chinese and also printed worldwide in many different languages to advance the ideology of “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought.” In 1969 I remember buying a copy of a pamphlet Mao had published in 1930 called “Oppose Book Worship!,” and with my sense of humor I’d wave it in the air like more orthodox Maoists were doing with the “Little Red Book” and scream, “Oppose book worship!” (Also that summer I met a 15-year-old named Chris Morton who had lived in China and introduced himself as the only white American Red Guard.)

When Hathaway meets Professor Soong, he turns out to be in a wheelchair and his caregiver is his daughter Soong Chu (Francesca Li), who judging from her amount of screen time compared to Anne Heywood’s is the true female lead of this film. She’s also the most morally ambiguous character in the movie, wearing a Red Guard armband and seemingly colluding in the capture and kidnapping of her father by the Red Guards and the looting of his office and his papers. At the same time Hathaway is forced to trust her because she’s his only link to her dad. One of the Red Guards who capture Soong Li intones with grim fanaticism that they’re trashing his lab and disposing of him (they don’t actually kill him, but they leave him prone in the middle of the street and destroy his wheelchair so he’s helpless) because “your usefulness as a scientist is done.” Before Hathaway leaves on his mission he’s briefed by U.S. official Lt. General Shelby (Arthur Hill) who for some reason wears bi-colored glasses, one lens clear while the other is dark green. (Was he supposed to be missing one eye and the opaque lens was to cover that up?) Shelby orders him to undergo an operation that will implant a radio transmitter in his head just below his ear, which will allow him to talk to Shelby and his other U.S. and British controllers any time he wants. In fact the transmitter is being used to monitor him 24/7, so Mission Control will know where he is and what he’s doing at all times. Unbeknownst to Hathaway – at least until midway through the movie – the device also contains an explosive that will allow his mission controllers to blow him up any time they so choose, though there’s some ambiguity as to whether the explosive (literally a “kill switch”) actually exists or Hathaway was just told that to keep him in line. For me the most surprising and interesting scene in the movie is the one in which Hathaway has an audience with Mao (Conrad Yama), though he’s referred to in the credits only as “The Chairman,” in which Mao insists that he and his government want to share the super-enzyme with the world. Unfortunately, Lt. General Shelby is listening in and he toys with the idea of detonating the explosive in Hathaway’s head and killing both him and “The Chairman.” Soong Li ultimately dies, though before he croaks he gives Hathaway a copy of the “Little Red Book” in which he’s inserted code containing the formula for the enzyme. The film ultimately turns into a long chase scene as Hathaway desperately tries to escape the Chinese and slip under an electrified border fence that will kill him instantly if his body makes contact with it. (Gregory Peck’s stunt double must have had quite a workout on this film.)

Shelby toys with the idea of setting off the bomb in Hathaway’s head lest he be captured and tortured by the Chinese, but at the last minute Russian border guards (the Russians are actually on the side of good in this one, which is unusual for a Cold War movie; apparently Jay Richard Kennedy, who wrote the source novel, and Ben Maddow, who did the script, were aware of the tensions between Russia and China in the real world and did not lump them together as “the Communist bloc”) take Hathaway across the border after blowing out the Chinese fence with mortars. The scene of Hathaway escaping through mountainous countryside reminded me so much of The Sound of Music I started singing, “The hills are alive … oops, wrong movie.” Once Hathaway is back home he decodes the formula for the enzyme – which is just eight letters, representing the three key amino acids in it, though the models of the enzyme’s molecules look fearsomely complicated – in the pages of Soong Li’s copy of the “Little Red Book.” Shelby tells Hathaway that the U.S. government wants to keep the enzyme a state secret and not allow any other country’s farmers to use it, but Hathaway insists that the formula should belong to the world and he intends to contact journalists and release it to the press. (Presumably the bomb inside his head has been removed by then, since if it hadn’t been one could imagine a nihilistic ending in which Shelby would blow up Hathaway to keep him from releasing the formula.) Hathaway and Kay (ya remember Kay?) have their romantic reunion as the film draws to a close, fortunately without the seemingly endless roll of closing credits we’ve become all too used to in subsequent movies.

Directed by J. Lee Thompson, an all-arounder whose best-known credit is probably the original 1962 Cape Fear with Peck and Robert Mitchum, The Chairman is a reasonably exciting thriller, though it has its longueurs. Gregory Peck, who was born April 5, 1916 and was therefore 53 years old when he made this movie, must have felt a certain dèja vu about this movie since he’d made his film debut a quarter-century earlier in a similar role in Days of Glory (1944), described on imdb.com as “An heroic guerrilla group fights back against impossible odds during the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union.” Later he’d make The Guns of Navarone (1961), in which he played the leader of a commando team sent to blow up the titular super-weapons. Through much of the movie I was looking at Peck and wondering, “Has he fathered the Antichrist yet?” (He hadn’t: The Omen wouldn’t come in his filmography until 1976, seven years later.) And to briefly mention the reason I was watching this movie – the musical score by Jerry Goldsmith – it’s quite effective when he isn’t drowning it with plucked strings (the lead instrument in the Main Title theme sounded like a koto to me; it’s true that’s Japanese instead of Chinese, but the Chinese may have something similar) and whole-tone scales to denote “Asianicity.” (I remember my surprise when I heard Jessie Matthews’s 1930 record of Rodgers and Hart’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” – written for her for the stage and film musical Evergreen – and in the middle of the piece her arranger inserted a cornball “Asian” motif, obviously because Rodgers had written a whole-tone scale into the release and it was a Pavlovian conditioned response to arrangers back then that whole-tone scales signaled “Asia.”)