The Forgotten John Wayne Film That Left A Tragic Legacy

Dick Powell's 1956 historical epic "The Conqueror" is one of the more notorious duds of the 1950s. It went famously over-budget, and while it did manage to make its money back, it was lambasted by critics at the time, mostly for its grievous miscasting of John Wayne as Genghis Khan. If you ever wanted to hear the Mongol leader Temujin with a Southern drawl, this film is a gift to you and you alone. The New York Times cited its bad script as a source of unintentional comedy, and John McCarten in The New Yorker mentioned that the many, many horses who fall down in the movie are more entertaining than anything the human actors do. "The Conqueror" has appeared in books covering the worst films of all time (most notably in "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time" by Michael Medved, Harry Medved, and Randy Dreyfuss). It was also the second-to-last film produced by Howard Hughes, who, after production, reportedly paid $12 million of his own money to buy every print of "The Conqueror" and keep it comfortably out of the public eye. Universal would eventually buy the rights to the film in 1979. 

But it wasn't just its shameful critical reception that left "The Conqueror" radioactive. Additionally, the production was wracked by actual radiation. The exterior scenes for "The Conqueror" were filmed in the desert outside of St. George, Utah, which is a mere 137 miles downwind of the Nevada National Security Site U.S. Government's most-used nuclear testing facility. In the years after production, almost half of the film's cast and crew — including Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and director Powell — contracted cancer. "The Conqueror" was literally filmed under a cloud.

In the years following the filming of "The Conqueror," members of the cast and crew became very sick. Actor Pedro Armendáriz developed terminal kidney cancer in 1960 and, upon learning the condition was fatal, died by suicide in 1963. That same year, Dick Powell died of lymphatic cancer at the age of 53. Susan Hayward, over the course of the 1970s, developed skin, breast, and uterine cancers before dying of brain cancer in 1974 at the age of 56. Agnes Moorehead died of uterine cancer in 1974, and John Wayne grappled with lung, throat, and stomach cancer for years and died in 1979. 

An investigation by People Magazine in 1980 found that 91 of the 220 people on the set of "The Conqueror" had developed some form of cancer, and that 46 of them had died. While it's been argued that there is no direct connection between the nuclear testing and the national average of people contracting cancer, the leukemia rates in St. George were in fact five times higher than the national average. There were several attempts to sue the government over what they knew about the dangers of radiation, but it wouldn't be until 1990 that then-president Bush would begin paying financial reparations to those who were made sick by, or those who lost relatives to, nuclear testing. The victims of nuclear fallout caused by American weapons testing called themselves downwinders. As of 2018, downwinders have received over $2.2 billion in compensation.