BY HANK REINEKE
Novelist Jay Richard Kennedy was, in his pre-Hollywood youth,
known to friends simply as Samuel Richard Solomonick. Idealistic and having come of age in the midst
of the U.S. depression, this native of Bronx, New York, would be caught up in
the radical politics of the 1930s. In
the years prior to the entry of the U.S. in World War II, Kennedy’s personal
politics were mostly aligned with those of domestic left-wing groups, including
the U.S. Communist Party. This marriage
of shared ideals was primarily due to the CP’s seemingly uncompromising anti-fascist
beliefs.
But Kennedy’s allegiance to the CP and to their professed
socialist ideals came to an abrupt end in 1939 when the Soviet Union’s Joseph
Stalin shocked internationalists and fellow travelers by doing the unthinkable
- co-signing a non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Germany. That agreement, of course, was not
long-lasting, broken when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. But Stalin’s pact with the Devil had irreparably
shaken the faith of many left-wing activists who had previously – and naively -
looked to the Soviet Union for political guidance.
Though Kennedy would abandon many tenets of the far left,
he remained an unapologetic political liberal. He was particularly active in the civil rights movements of the 1960s. He worked alongside members of C.O.R.E.
(Congress of Racial Equality) and professed solidarity with the Black Panther
Party. In truth, this activist wasn’t doing
so badly working within the framework of the capitalist system. In April 1966,
the recording industry trade magazine Billboard
would describe the creative Kennedy as a true renaissance man. He was, they explained, been “at various
times a writer for films, radio producer, novelist, talent manager, songwriter,
and music publisher.â€
At age 54, Kennedy’s youthful radicalism, while never
abandoned, was likely tempered when he was tapped by Frank Sinatra to head the record
and music publishing wing of Sinatra Enterprises. Kennedy’s 1965 novel, Favor the Runner, had mixed politics and seamy stories of entertainment
industry practices. The novel was
praised by Sinatra as “the most entertaining and beautifully written novel
about show business to be published in this or any season… a swinging,
shattering, glorious experience.â€
Though the film credits of The Chairman do note that the film was based on a Kennedy’s original
novel, it would appear as though the book was only first published two months
following the movie’s release in June 1969. It was also published in an odd manner, the mass-market Signet paperback
movie-tie-in of August 1969 preceding the later 1970 hardcover by the New
American Library/World Publishing. The
hardcover version of the book was simultaneously published in the UK under the
more intriguing title “The Most Dangerous Man in the World.†(This title was
retained for the UK release of the film.)
As Kennedy had a life-long interest in contemporary
international-politics, it’s not surprising that the ideas behind The Chairman would germinate from his
passion. In 1966 Mao Zedong, the Chairman
of the Communist Party of Party, would architect his infamous “Cultural
Revolution,†fervently calling on students and workers to commit themselves to
continual revolution. It was a
disastrous experiment, an anti-intellectual call to arms. During a four year period, universities were shuttered
and any semblance of a free press crushed, leaving only Mao’s cult-of-personality
and famed “Little Red Book†to light the path to world revolutionary socialism. Professors, intellectuals, workers of mid-to-high
station - even loyal Communist Party members - were publically criticized,
chastised and jailed by Mao’s infamous Red
Guard, derided by the faithful as “Capitalist Roaders.â€
Interestingly, the term “Capitalist Roader†was invoked
to disparage the new bourgeois class of
post-revolutionary China, accusing former comrades of abuses of privilege and
power. Such charges were – somewhat
oddly - more anti-Soviet than anti-American in their hysteria. In the mid 1950s, Mao had soured on what he
perceived as the U.S.S.R.’s softening anti-revolutionary rhetoric and other “anti-socialistâ€
practices as détente. Mao deemed such
peace offerings as misguided and “revisionist.†It was a moment in time when the Soviet Union and China were jockeying
for position as the preeminent architects of the international socialist
movement.
The opening credit sequence of J. Lee Thompson’s The Chairman perfectly captures the
revolutionary zeal of Mao’s Red Guards. Playing beneath composer Jerry Goldsmith’s stirring score is a montage
of folk art and propaganda poster images of China’s peasant class brandishing
their “Little Red Books,†holding them triumphantly aloft in their left-hands
or dutifully studying Mao’s enlightening text.
The film had been in the works for some time. In February 1967, the syndicated gossip
columnist Earl Wilson teased: “Jay Richard Kennedy, Frank Sinatra’s story
sleuth, is winding up the minutes of The
Chairman, about Commie China, which Frank, Yul Brynner, and Spencer
Tracy’ll have fun with in Hong Kong next fall.†None of this would actually happen, of course, though Frank Sinatra was strongly
rumored to have been considered for the role of the Nobel Prize-winning
scientist John Hathaway early on. The
part eventually went to Gregory Peck. For his troubles, Peck would sign onto a contract that reportedly paid
him $500,000 dollars and 10% of any profits. Peck had been working steadily, though his more recent films had not
been overly successful at the box office. In 1969, the actor would appear in no fewer than four feature-length
films of varying success. Though The Chairman, Peck’s first film with 20th
Century Fox in more than a decade, eventually brought in 2.5 million dollars,
it was not a huge box-office success. The film would only rank as the forty-first highest-grossing film of
1969.
On July 17, 1968, Hollywood gossip columnist Joyce Haber
reported that producer Arthur Jacobs was in London test-screening some of the
“10,000 feet of film†the filmmaker had managed to photograph discreetly
“behind the bamboo curtain for use in The
Chairman.†Afterwards, the
production crew was to move to Hong Kong for principal photography. Jacob’s first choice to helm the feature was
the British director Peter Yates. Yates
was a natural choice for this espionage film, having previously worked on such ITV
television series as The Saint with
Roger Moore and Danger Man with
Patrick McGoohan. Yates had recently –
and easily - made the transition to feature films, beginning with Robbery (1967) but scoring big-time with
Bullitt (1968) featuring Steve
McQueen.
Jacob’s talks with Yates eventually stalled, perhaps due to the success of the latter film
which might have made the director too hot – or too expensive - a property to
sign on to The Chairman. Jacobs then offered the directorial job to another
Brit, the equally talented J. Lee Thompson. Thompson was a natural choice. He had already worked with Gregory Peck
on The Guns of Navarone (1961, for
which he would receive a “Best Director†nomination by the Academy), Cape Fear (1962), and the all-star cast
assembled in search of Mackenna’s Gold
(1969).
In The Chairman,
Gregory Peck portrays John Hathaway, an American currently residing in England and
lecturing at a London university. He is
contacted by Shelby, an American military attaché, who along with a Russian
diplomat, and a British RAF officer, press him into accepting an industrial
espionage assignment, code name Minotaur. It seems the Red Chinese have developed a
ground-breaking agricultural enzyme that allows for crops to grow in usually unfriendly
environments. With such ground breaking technology,
the allies are afraid the world’s power balance will accordingly tilt. They are afraid that the poorest nations of
the third world would sidle to the side of their Peking benefactors.
The Chinese have already expressed interest in having Hathaway
lend his scientific expertise to their breakthrough. Though they possess the secret formula, they
have thus far been unable to produce this enzyme in sufficient quantities. As few Americans are welcomed to Peking, the
calculating Shelby wants Hathaway to accept the invitation of the Reds. He’s not to help out as they wish, of course,
but will only be sent east long enough to steal their secret. The scientist refuses until the U.S.
President himself calls, urging Hathaway to accept as the mission has been
deemed as being of “urgent and terrific importance.â€
Hathaway relents and agrees to have a “Q-23 transmitterâ€
surgically inserted as a mastoid sinus canal implant. While Hathaway is told the implant has a
satellite monitored tracking radius of one hundred and ten miles and can even
monitor changes in his physiology, he is not informed the device also houses a
“coil of explosive wire†which the military can remotely detonate should the
mission go wrong. Arriving in China in
the midst of the Cultural Revolution - already warily surveilled by his cautious
and suspicious Chinese hosts - things, quite understandably, go wrong rather
quickly.
While a very entertaining and old fashioned Cold War thriller,
The Chairman does suffers from a bit
of an identity crisis. It’s first
positioned as a serious film involving a chess game of competing ideologies and
geo-political espionage. But it soon loses
such sober prestige when it occasionally dresses as a pastiche of a more
outlandish James Bond adventure. In many
respects the film is less interesting as the controversies that would surround
its production. Principal photography on
The Chairman was scheduled from
August 26th through December 3rd, 1968. Most of the film’s interior scenes were shot without
incident on the soundstages of Pinewood Studios, with the windy and rugged
cliff sides of Scotland doubling as those of western Mongolia.
The real troubles began when, following a series of
location shoots in Taiwan, the cast and crew were due to arrive in Hong Kong on
Saturday, November 30, 1968. The
company’s Hong Kong schedule was unceremoniously scrapped when, on Wednesday
the 27th, the New York Times
reported the “British colonial government, reacting to Communist protests,
announced today that it had forbidden an American film unit to shoot several
sequences here of the movie The Chairman.†The leftist Wen Wei Pao and other Communist newspapers were at the forefront of
cancellation of the film unit’s business in Hong Kong. The newssheets all published editorials
decrying the project as a “conspiracy of the British and American
imperialists,†an “insult to Chairman Mao,†and a “serious provocation against
the 700 million Chinese people.â€
Interestingly, there was not a lot of support for the production
team in Hong Kong’s non-Communist mainstream press either. Beginning In the spring of 1967, Hong Kong had
been wracked with nearly eight months of serious violence – bombings,
assassinations, and street riots – following a series of hit-and-run
confrontations between police and Communist agitators in the wake of a labor
dispute. The resulting chaos and
property damage had wearied many of the 8.5 million people living in Hong
Kong. They were less interested in
engaging in a free-speech battle, opting instead for an uneasy peace. To complicate matters further, a
British-based journalist for Reuters was concurrently being held under house
arrest in Peking, the capitol of mainland China. The reporter’s detention was seen by most
observers as Peking’s retaliatory tactic for what they accused was Hong Kong’s
“unjustified persecution of Communist reporters.â€