Question of the Day - 21 February 2020

The movie was a total stinker called The Conqueror. It was not only financed, but also conceived, by none other than Howard Hughes in the mid-1950s, after he'd already started to lose his mind. It was an epic in which Wayne played the Mongolian chieftain Genghis Khan and his love interest was Susan Hayward as a Tatar princess.

The starring role was originally written for Marlon Brando, who had the good sense in more ways than one, as we'll see, to stay as far away from it as possible, and the film made all kinds of worst-movie lists, including big write-ups in books about the 10-worst and 50-worst. Using a "wooden Wayne" to play Khan was called by another bad-movie book "one of the worst casting decisions of all time." And one reviewer listed it as "the worst biopic ever made." 

Moviegoers stayed away in droves.

The exterior scenes were shot in southwestern Utah, near St. George -- directly in the path of the prevailing winds from the Nevada Proving Grounds (now called the Nevada National Security Site), which was exploding nuclear devices above ground in those days, exactly 100 of them between 1951 and 1962, nearly one a month. 

The cast and crew spent many weeks at the filming site, mucking around in radioactive dirt and dust. Worse, Hughes had 60 tons of the stuff shipped back to Hollywood so that the re-shoots would match the Utah location. According to our research, "The filmmakers knew about the nuclear tests, but the federal government assured residents that the tests caused no hazard to public health."

Well, whatever the feds did or didn't know (and we've published a couple QoDs about it; the one from 2011 tells the whole story, while the other from 2018 is a two-parter about current levels of local radiation), a whole lot of livestock and people in southwestern Utah, known as "downwinders," got sick and died very quickly. The longer-term effects included an inordinate number of cast and crew on The Conqueror.

Of the 220 people on the movie site, 91 of them were diagnosed with cancer within the next 25 years and 46 died from the disease. Several of John Wayne and Susan Hayward’s relatives who visited the set developed malignancies as well.  

Director Dick Powell was among the first, dying in 1963. Actor Pedro Armendáriz was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1960 and killed himself in 1963 after learning that his condition was terminal. Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead died of cancer in the 1970s.

As for Wayne himself, he contracted cancer twice. In 1964 at age 54, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and had his left lung and several ribs removed. At the time, it was attributed to his five-pack-a-day unfiltered-cigarette habit. He remained clinically cancer free until early 1979, 15 years later, when a virulent form of cancer attacked his stomach, intestines, and spine, killing him in June of that year after a losing battle of only a few months.

Although it can't be known for certain, many reports we've seen have attributed the metastases and fast-spreading malignancies to the radiation he was exposed to on the set of The Conqueror.