The Conqueror Reviews

A notoriously awful John Wayne effort, THE CONQUEROR has been written about and discussed continually since its premiere. It is a disaster for a variety of reasons, including its remarkably atrocious dialogue, ridiculous casting, producer Howard Hughes' bizarre obsession with the film in his later years, and, most importantly, the fact that the film was shot in Utah, only 136 miles from a huge atomic test site. Of the 220 people who worked on the film, more than 90 later contracted cancer, and half of those died from the disease. The deaths included director Dick Powell and stars John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz, and Agnes Moorehead. This terrible sacrifice was made for a truly bad film, which has little or nothing to do with the historical Genghis Khan. Temujin (Wayne), later to be known as Genghis Khan, and Jamuga (Armendariz) are Mongols who love nothing better than raping and pillaging. They attack a caravan and capture Bortai (Hayward), daughter of Kumlek (Ted de Corsia), the Tartar ruler. Although she is resistant at first, the fiery redhead eventually comes to love the brutal Mongol and becomes his loyal wife, despite the fact that he's waging war against her people. RKO chief Hughes sank $6 million into this Cinemascope production, and while it didn't flop outright, it was a disappointment at the box office. Oddly, Hughes was to become obsessed with the film, and a year after selling RKO he bought back the rights to THE CONQUEROR and the almost-as-bad JET PILOT for $12 million, an unheard-of sum. Hughes pulled all prints of both from the market and had them screened privately, night after night, for his own edification.