John Wayne is one of Hollywood’s most legendary performers, the Oscar-winning star of such movies as True Grit, Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Quiet Man. In a career full of movie gold, however, it’s no surprise that Wayne has also made a few box office turkeys along the way too—most notable of all, arguably, 1956’s The Conqueror.
Directed by Dick Powell, The Conqueror was a historical retelling of the life of the brutal 13th-century Mongol warlord Genghis Khan. Wayne, of course, played the eponymous conqueror, but never one of the most versatile actors, his performance is now considered one of Hollywood’s greatest miscastings. At the box office, the movie initially made back barely two-thirds of its enormous $6 million budget. Today, it’s widely considered one of the weakest movies of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and one of the biggest duds in John Wayne’s long and otherwise impressive career.
There is, however, a more sinister reason why The Conqueror remains talked about today.
The movie was filmed at various locations across the state of Utah, among them Leeds, Snow Canyon, and Harrisburg. But many of its grand exterior shots were filmed in and around St. George, a remote city in Washington County—which, at the time, stood barely 130 miles downwind of the United States government’s Nevada National Security Site. It was there in the heat of the desert sun, and at the tail end of World War Two, that the government and Manhattan Project scientists had conducted a series of devastating nuclear weapon tests a decade earlier. And the region around St. George, though declared safe at the time, received the brunt of nuclear fallout from this long period of testing.
The government reportedly chose the location so that the prevailing wind in the area would carry the fallout from the blasts away from the more heavily populated areas of Vegas and Los Angeles to the southwest and instead toward what was classed as the “virtually uninhabitable” land downwind. The production team behind The Conqueror, meanwhile, chose the area, believing it to be safe, because its vast “uninhabitable” landscape resembled the open wastelands of Genghis Khan’s Mongolian Empire.
Concerns were raised during filming about the safety of the area; an infamous photograph even shows John Wayne operating a Geiger counter on set, which reportedly crackled so loudly when he turned it on that he initially thought it was broken. Their worries were short-lived and shrugged off, however, as reassurances came from the Federal Government that the area was indeed safe to film in. As a result, the cast and crew spent several grueling weeks filming battle scenes in and around St. George and Snow Canyon, blissfully unaware of just how toxic the landscape truly was.
A later investigation proved that, of the 220 cast and crew who were involved in the shoot, more than 90 developed medical conditions related to exposure to radiation—including Wayne himself and his co-stars Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Pedro Armendariz, all of whom succumbed to cancers eventually tied to their time on set in Utah in the 1970s. The director Dick Powell, too, died of cancer just seven years after the film was released.
Meanwhile, the producer Howard Hughes—though unaffected by the shoot himself, reportedly felt so guilty for arranging the filming locations (despite the government advice telling him it was safe) that he spent more than $10 million purchasing every print of the movie, and effectively removed all trace of it from circulation. The film remained out of circulation until after Hughes’ death in 1976, when his library of movies was purchased by Universal Studios. As well as not being critically well-received, the aftermath of The Conqueror has ultimately become one of Hollywood’s darkest and bitterest scandals.