The Chairman

The Chairman (1969)

If the Red Chinese don't kill him... a computer in London will!

An American scientist is sent to Red China to steal the formula for a newly developed agricultural enzyme. What he is not told by his bosses is that a micro-sized bomb has been planted in his brain so that should the mission ever look likely to fail, he can be eliminated at the push of a button!

Date of release
1969-06-25
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (26)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Action, Thriller
Director
J. Lee Thompson

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Pinewood Studios

The Chairman is a 1969 spy film starring Gregory Peck. It was directed by J. Lee Thompson. The screenplay was by Ben Maddow based on a novel by Jay Richard Kennedy.

Production

Jay Richard Kennedy who had written several novels and created the radio and television espionage show The Man Called X became vice president of Sinatra Enterprises in 1966. He wrote a screenplay to star Frank Sinatra, Spencer Tracy and Yul Brynner. When the project didn't go ahead, Kennedy turned the aborted screenplay into a novel.

In July 1966 Richard Quine was going to make the film as part of a two-picture deal with Sinatra (the first was going to be an adaptation of Hemingway's Across the River to the Trees.) However neither project proceeded.

In April 1967 Arthur P. Jacobs picked up the project for 20th Century Fox. By August Ben Maddow was writing the script with Sinatra to star Maddow was a leftist but called his assignment "Just a job. It was just a melodrama, which they tried to make concurrent with the politics at the time. I didn't know anything about Mao, to tell the truth. Nobody else did really, either."

In June 1968 Gregory Peck was announced as star and Mort Abrahams as producer. Then J. Lee Thompson signed as director, thus reuniting the star and director of The Guns of Navarone in their fourth and final pairing.

Requests for permission to film in China were refused; the film was partly shot in Hong Kong until the production was ordered to leave due to protests by communists. (Jacobs says communists set off a fake bomb and warned that there would be a real one if The Chairman filmed there.) Thompson used guerrilla filmmaking to get Hong Kong location shots.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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