J Paul Johnson
Just how bad was The Conqueror? It’s the stuff of cinema legend, known today as the nadir of Yellowface, Hollywood’s practice of casting non-Asian actors in Asian roles, usually without any empathy or cultural understanding. John Wayne as Genghis Khan? The only thing that could make that performance any worse is if Wayne drank his way through the dialogue—which by all reports, he did. He wasn’t the only performer suspiciously cast: Susan Hayward, William Conrad, Lee Van Cleef, John Hoyt, Agnes Moorehead, and even the Mexican actor Pedro Armendáriz all played thirteenth-century Mongols (Hayward with a spectacular head of flaming red hair she refused to dye or cover). A calamitous disaster of a film, The Conqueror, though was not just awful by cinematic standards. A new documentary, The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout lays out the argument that it was literally toxic.
The Conqueror was the brainchild of financier/producer Howard Hughes, who later became America’s most famous recluse, reportedly watching and rewatching the film over and over late in life, alone, unkempt, and unwell. He’d bought up every available print to keep it out of circulation. To make the film he had hired an industry buddy, the gregarious actor Dick Powell, to direct, though nothing in Powell’s career suggested any particular depth of historical knowledge or cultural acumen. Hughes and Powell cast the film with the biggest stars they could afford, regardless of their looks or heritage: Wayne was still the biggest star of the era and thus little thought was given to whether he was the right choice to play a Mongol Khan. The film’s chosen location of Snow Canyon near little St. George, Utah made, at least at the time, more sense: its arid landscape at least partially resembled the Gobi desert.
That choice would prove fatal.
The residents of St. George, then a quiet, bucolic neighborhood community, were delighted to see Hollywood royalty hanging out at their local diners and watering holes. Most there knew at the time of the above-ground nuclear testing that the U.S. government was conducting some 130 miles away at the Yucca Flats / Nevada Test Site, a program that ran from 1953 to 1961. Some in fact made a picnic of watching the spectacle of twenty-ton mushroom clouds rise up into the sky in the distance. What they did not know then was that winds routinely carried the fallout of these tests—more than twenty times that released by Chernobyl, for comparison, directly towards them.
On set, meanwhile, Powell’s lackadaisical direction resulted in more than a few animal and actor injuries. The extras and horses kicked up the desert’s red dust—unbeknownst to them, saturated with nuclear fallout—into a constant cloud. Some of the cast and crew wore masks while not on camera. It did them little good. Worse, Powell had six tons of the radioactive clay shipped to a soundstage in Culver City for studio shoots, where breathing in the stuff was unavoidable.
It was not too long after that the cast and crew associated with the film began to fall ill. Armendáriz was diagnosed with a terminal kidney cancer and killed himself. Powell succumbed to lymphatic cancer. Hayward and Moorehead made it a little longer, but both died of cancer in the 1970s, as did Wayne. Van Cleef, in 1989, and Hoyt, in 1991, did too. Nearly half of the 220 people who had worked on the film had developed some form of cancer, and by 1980, half of those had died. Wayne, who spent years fighting his cancers of the lung, throat, and stomach before finally succumbing in June 1979 at the age of 72, long held that his cancer could not have been caused by radiation exposure. But many others think him wrong and that the catastrophic consequence of the Conqueror shoot could not be mere coincidence. Cases of leukemia in St. George spiked to five times that of normal in the 1970s as did thyroid cancer in young children.
The notoriety of The Conqueror brought attention to the cause of the “Downwinders”—a group citizens united in the belief that the government’s nuclear testing program resulted in a fallout causing all kinds of cancer. Together they have fought for recognition and reparations. It took eleven years for The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) of 1979 to pass; when it did, in 1990, it allowed $50,000 and $100,000 to those suffering from any other cancer determined by the National Cancer Institute to “develop after exposure to low-level radiation.” More than $2 billion has been awarded to cancer victims, but by the time of settlement, many of those impacted had, sadly, already died.
The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout traces this unlikely, tragic legacy of one of Hollywood’s most epic failures, a film that was not only notoriously bad—but ultimately fatal for many who worked on it. Director William Nunez takes on a difficult challenge in contextualizing 1950s Hollywood, nuclear testing, Yellowface casting, the careers of Wayne and Hughes, and more, but the film’s sprightly pace and sometimes-cheeky tone keep it from feeling too expository, even with a nearly-two-hour runtime. The Conqueror was a failure of remarkable ineptitude, with its director and producer’s callous disregard for on-set safety, its racist casting, and its casual approach to history. Worse, though, it may well have been fatal for many involved, its legacy now forever tainted by the consequence of the cancers so many of its cast and crew would later suffer.
Nunez’s documentary charts this sad episode with animated storyboards re-enacting Hughes in his decline, a ton of archival and behind-the-scenes footage, voice-over narration from Sophie Okenedo, interviews with descendants of the primary cast (including Wayne’s and Hayward’s sons, the latter of whom saw a hulking, shadowy figure flitting between their abodes in the middle of the night), film critics, and, most importantly, others who lived in and near St. George and like those involved with The Conqueror shoot, became victims of a cancer caused by the U.S. government’s nuclear testing. And ultimately, it’s their—the Downwinders’—story that The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout makes clear: they are the unwitting victims of the choices made by their own government.
The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout is currently showing in U.S. theaters.
