wreck holding their head up.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
One of the dullest actioners ever. A miscast John Wayne is cast as
Mongol warrior Genghis Khan, but makes for one of the most unlikely looking
and sounding easterners. The big-budget ($6 million) epic historical film
is an artistic embarrassment and also a box office flop. Not only
is the directing terrible, the acting by everyone wooden, and the dialogue
stilted, but it’s overlong and difficult to watch without either laughing
at in derision or tuning it out. No one comes out of this train wreck holding
their head up. It’s a bad film that’s really that bad. It tells about the
early days of the 12th-century Genghis Khan; it’s played as a solemn CinemaScope
costume pic, but Wayne can’t help playing the eastern warrior as a gunfighting
cowboy which is not the way to play his character. This ruins any attempt
to make it even semi-plausible, aside from the fact that its history is
so loosely interpreted that it’s rendered meaningless. Wayne is forced
to say lines such as this one to Hayward: “You’re beautiful in your wrath.”
Billionaire producer Howard Hughes insisted on shooting in Utah’s
Escalante Desert. The desert area had been used for atom bomb tests. Coincidentally
all the following died from cancer in due time: Dick Powell, John Wayne,
Susan Hayworth, Pedro Armendáriz, and Agnes Moorehead. Supposedly
of the 220 people who worked on the film, more than 90 later came down
with cancer. Which makes you scratch your head and look back in wonder
why the effort for such a lousy film. Hughes must have remembered this
about the ill effects of radiation, because in his recluse days in Las
Vegas he did all he could to stop atom bomb testing in Nevada. According
to the book Citizen Hughes by Michael Drosnin, Hughes bribed Nixon to eventually
move the tests to Alaska. Hughes after selling RKO bought back the rights
to both The Conqueror and the slightly better Jet Pilot for $12 million,
and didn’t allow any prints to reach the public. During his recluse days,
the mentally unbalanced Hughes watched these films in the nude over and
over again. I think if I was forced to watch The Conqueror for an extended
period of time, I too would begin to lose whatever marbles I had and throw
away my clothes.
The plot has Temujin (John Wayne), a ferocious Mongol warrior, abduct
the beautiful Tartar princess Bortai (Susan Hayward), who might be the
only Tartar redhead in history, from her soon-to-husband Targutai. In captivity
the treacherous Bortai, whose father defeated Temujin’s father in battle,
schemes to get Temujin into mistrusting his blood brother Jamuga (Pedro
Armendáriz). Later she falls in love with the stud warrior and all
becomes square again.
Temujin’s mother Hunlun is played by Agnes Moorehead while Thomas
Gomez plays Wang Khan, whose emperor title Temujin will inherit after vanquishing
his enemies in the Gobi Desert.