The story of the 1956 film The Conqueror is among the most shameful in the history of
Hollywood.
The big-budget would-be blockbuster featured an epically miscast John Wayne as the 13th
century Mongol warlord Genghis Khan
It’s not just that Genghis Khan had a southern drawl, no that’s bad enough.
The worst part is The Conqueror nearly killed half its cast.
One of the last films produced by the famously eccentric businessman Howard Hughes, The Conqueror
was a critical laughing stock and a commercial failure.
In his later years, Hughes reportedly bought up every print of the film he could find,
and obsessively watched it nearly every evening in his private screening room.
Why?
Some speculate it was out of guilt over the decision to film The Conqueror in a nuclear
fallout zone.
Yes, it's true.
The Conqueror was filmed on location outside the dusty, sleepy town of St. George, Utah,
which lay about 100 miles downwind of the U.S. Government's nuclear test zone.
In 1953 alone, the government ran 11 nuclear tests there, assuring the residents of St.
George that there was no danger from the radiation.
They were wrong.
Between 1954, when The Conqueror filmed in St. George, and 1981, no fewer than 91 of
the production's 220 cast and crew contracted some type of cancer.
And that number doesn't include incidents of cancer among family members who also spent
the summer on the set.
At the time, it was thought the location was safe, so even Wayne himself brought his sons
Patrick and Michael for an extended visit both later developed cancer.
At one point, a Geiger counter was brought to the set, but it gave off so much noise
that Wayne assumed it was malfunctioning.
But it wasn't, and the cast and crew soon began to suffer the effects.
Wayne's co-star, Pedro Armendariz, developed kidney cancer in 1960, and took his own life
in 1963 after being given a terminal diagnosis.
That same year, director Dick Powell succumbed to cancerous lymphoma.
Another of Wayne's co-stars, veteran stage and screen actress and four-time Academy Award
nominee Agnes Moorhead, passed away from uterine cancer in 1972, and Kahn’s love interest
Susan Hayward died of pneumonia brought on from complications due to brain cancer in
1975.
As for Wayne, he received a diagnosis of lung cancer in 1964.
After having one of his lungs and four ribs removed, he was declared cancer free, and
went on to star in several more classic films, including The Green Berets and True Grit.
His final role, in the 1976 Western The Shootist, was an eerie harbinger of things to come;
he portrayed an aging gunfighter who engages in one last campaign for frontier justice
after being told that his painful death from cancer is imminent.
During a routine gallbladder removal in 1979, surgeons found a malignant tumor which forced
them to remove the Duke's stomach; Wayne died six months later.
All told, 46 people who worked on The Conqueror died from cancer or related illnesses.
And they aren't alone.
A subsequent study concluded that as many as 11,000 Americans a figure which some believe
to be ridiculously conservative lost their lives as a result of Cold War-era nuclear
testing.
Since 1990, a fund established by Congress has paid out $2 billion dollars to residents
of the very fallout area where The Conqueror was filmed, an area which includes St. George,
in which cancer rates remain abnormally high.
In 2015, St. George resident and activist Michelle Thomas a cancer survivor whose mother
died from the disease told The Guardian,
"It's gone into our DNA.
I've lost count of the friends I've buried.
I'm not patriotic.
My government lied to me.
[...] You have to forgive me if I don't give a shit about John Wayne.
They rewrote my DNA.
They rewrote my life."
By all accounts, Hughes considered his choice of location for The Conqueror's shoot to be
the worst mistake of his life.
To his credit, though, it should be noted that before selecting St. George as the location,
he was worried about the possibility of radiation danger from the testing.
So he asked the government's Atomic Energy Commission for advice.
Their answer?
They told him it would be perfectly safe.
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