Unknown John Wayne Movie: The Duke As Genghis Khan!

In 1956, Howard Hughes wanted to make a movie about Genghis Khan. His original plan was for Marlon Brando to play Khan, but 20th Century Fox refused to loan Brando out to RKO. Then Hughes remembered that John Wayne still owed RKO one more movie on an old contract he signed in 1939, so they forced him to play Genghis Khan, complete with oriental mustache. The film is called The Conqueror, and is considered one of the 50 worst films ever made, but it is rarely seen. It's never on TV. But it was on DVD for a short while almost ten years ago, and the full film can be watched on Google Video (embedded below), with Wayne dressed as a mongol with the crazy mustache. The entire movie is a trainwreck. But there's more to the legend of The Conqueror than just a bad movie.

Howard Hughes, years after selling RKO and said to be feeling guilty about his part in the production, spent a huge sum of money to buy back all the prints of the film and refused to allow the film to be seen until 1974. What did he feel guilty about? Read on...



From Wikipedia:

"The exterior scenes were shot on location near St. George, Utah, 137 miles downwind of the United States government's Nevada Test Site, Operation Upshot-Knothole, where extensive above-ground nuclear weapons testing occurred during the 1950s. The cast and crew spent many difficult weeks on the site. In addition, Hughes later shipped 60 tons of dirt back to Hollywood for re-shoots. The cast and crew knew about the nuclear tests—there are pictures of Wayne holding a Geiger counter during production—but the link between exposure to radioactive fallout and cancer was poorly understood then.

"Powell died of cancer in January 1963, only a few years after the picture's completion. Hayward, Wayne, and Moorehead all died of cancer in the mid to late 1970s. Cast member actor John Hoyt died of lung cancer in 1991. Pedro Armendáriz was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1960 and committed suicide after he learned it was terminal. Skeptics point to other factors such as the wide use of tobacco—Wayne and Moorehead in particular were heavy smokers—and the notion that cancer resulting from radiation exposure does not have such a long incubation period. The cast and crew totaled 220. 91 developed some form of cancer by 1981 and 46 had died of it by then.[1] Dr. Robert Pendleton, professor of biology at the University of Utah, stated, "With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you'd expect only 30 some cancers to develop...I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up in a court of law."

It wasn't just the cast and crew who were exposed to radiation. There were hundreds of local Native Americans used as extras, plus friends and family who visited the set, including the Duke's children. Michael Wayne later developed skin cancer, and Patrick was operated on for a breast tumor. The population of St. George, Utah, where the movie was filmed, also suffered abnormally high numbers of citizens who died from cancer in the years after the government nuclear tests.