The Chairman

Gregory Peck stars in The Chairman as an agent dispatched to China to uncover the secret of an agricultural enzyme developed by Mao’s regime to allow crops to grow in all climates. Unknown to him, a device has been planted in his head which can explode by a remote command, leaving his superiors with an interesting choice to make when he finds himself in the vicinity of Mao.

The film was not successful and lives on in the memory today only really as a result of its music, by the formidable Jerry Goldsmith. This was the first of four films he did with journeyman director J. Lee Thompson, who had a run of successful films earlier in the 1960s but was never able to replicate that success despite being highly prolific all the way up to his death in 1989. (Ironically, despite their ongoing collaboration elsewhere, the two Planet of the Apes sequels directed by Thompson were not scored by Goldsmith.)

Like many Jerry Goldsmith fans, I have always been a keen admirer of this score, but frustrated by the poor audio quality of the original recording – despite the best efforts of different labels over the years, each of the releases sounded poor. So in 2025 it was great to see a successful Kickstarter campaign was able to fund a re-recording by Intrada, with William Stromberg conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in a recording produced by the incredible Leigh Phillips. It comes as no surprise to report that the finished product is absolutely first-rate, and allows this wonderful music to be enjoyed properly for the first time.

Goldsmith had already taken some musical trips to the East for films like The Spiral Road and, most notably, The Sand Pebbles and there are certainly some echoes of those scores in The Chairman. His “ethnic” flavours are highly westernised impressions of Chinese music rather than striving for authenticity (the most overtly Chinese-sounding texture actually comes from a Hungarian instrument, the cimbalom), but of course the film is aimed at western audiences and the composer pulls all this off with aplomb.

He anchors his score around two main themes. The incredibly dynamic main title cue which opens the album introduces us to the main theme – a powerhouse march representing China and its leader, it’s such a fulsome, exciting piece of music. It is heard numerous times through the score – as he did throughout his career, the composer takes motivic fragments from his main theme and uses them to form the basis of some of the score’s numerous action pieces – with its most ferociously powerful performance being saved for the end title. It’s always been a favourite of mine.

The second major theme is the love theme – which, amusingly, Goldsmith adapts depending on precisely who it is that Peck’s character is in love with at any particular time. While not as memorable as the main theme, it’s a sweet piece and certainly does its job. David Whitaker arranged it into an album track for the original recording, “The World Only Lovers See”, distinguished by featuring the composer himself performing the piano part; and while it is a little dated-sounding in its arrangement now, almost sixty years have passed since that arrangement was made to appeal to listeners of the time so this is not exactly a surprise. Its various appearances within the body of the score itself do not suffer from this problem.

The score features a fair amount of interesting suspense music, with interesting textures arising from an array of percussion (including wood blocks and chimes which suggest the requisite ethnic flavours, and often the composer’s trademark low-end piano, perhaps even lower-end than usual in this score) and fluttering winds, with flute and oboe featuring prominently throughout.

What is quite different about The Chairman compared with The Sand Pebbles though is the sheer amount of action music here. In the first half of the score, “A Late Visitor” and “The Airport” are both pure dynamite, and a little later I love “The Students” which blends a highly entertaining set of variations on the opening section of the main theme with some aggressive, highly complex writing for the brass section.

Perhaps my favourite part of the score apart from the bookending credits pieces is the two-part “Hathaway’s Plans” (abridged and named “Escape” on previous releases) and “Hathaway’s Flight”. The first part focuses on exquisite, emotionally-wrought material for strings, with staccato bursts of piano or occasionally brass punctuating this creating tension; then in the second, Goldsmith gradually builds up a piece of action/suspense music as only he could, with intricate passages for the percussion joining the ever-increasing orchestral forces. Then “Hathaway’s Flight” is the first in a sequence of action cues that largely lasts through to the end of the score, a classic example of the composer’s mastery of that style.

I know that many Goldsmith fans who were introduced to his music in the later part of his career can sometimes struggle with his earlier work, but The Chairman is one that I always recommend without hesitation to them – and, to state the obvious, it has never sounded better than it does on this remarkably faithful recording, which reveals so many details never previously-heard, and by including the full score in chronological order reveals the composer’s narrative mastery in all its glory. It’s magnificently entertaining and the team behind the reconstruction and re-recording deserve the highest praise.

The album doesn’t stop there though, with several additional (but unrelated) pieces from other Goldsmith scores being included as bonuses. I enjoy the pieces from Lilies of the Field, Not Without My Daughter and (especially) “Alex’s Death” from Under Fire, not included on any releases of that score but a dynamite piece of action music – there’s no doubting the real gems though. First is the unused end title music from Rambo: First Blood Part 2, included as a bonus track on Intrada’s release of that score but with archival sound because the only available source was a cassette – it’s great to hear this dynamic recording of it, which features such a faithful rendering of the original recording’s synth sounds that it can be placed at the end of that score’s album with you barely able to notice that the recording is made 40 years later.

The real star of the show is the first opportunity for most of us to hear a demo Goldsmith wrote for Game of their Lives, a film he was ultimately unable to complete work on as he was seriously ill at the end of his life. While the film itself may not have made much of an impression and has largely already disappeared from memories, of all the “what might have been” projects for the composer near the end of his life, this is undoubtedly the one that I’m most disappointed he was unable to do. “An inspirational sports movie directed by David Anspaugh” – Goldsmith did do two of them, Hoosiers and Rudy, providing each with a masterpiece of a score – how lucky we would have been to have had a third. We are however very lucky to be able to hear this demo – while clearly very closely modelled on his concert piece “Fireworks”, and only three minutes long, there’s still enough here to know just how entertaining the full score would have been. It rounds off what is a wonderful album, an essential purchase for Goldsmith fans.