Movies - The Conqueror

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	Movies - The Conqueror

The Conqueror was a 1956 film produced by Howard Hughes and starring John Wayne in a portrayal of the life of the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan. Other performers included Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead Pedro Armendáriz and Chief Tahachee. The picture was directed by actor/director Dick Powell.

The picture was a critical and commercial failure (often ranked as one of the worst films of the 1950s), which is remarkable given the stature of the cast. Wayne, who was at the height of his career, had lobbied for the role after seeing the script and was widely believed to have been grossly miscast. (He was so "honored" by The Golden Turkey Awards.)

Reportedly, Howard Hughes felt guilty about his decisions regarding the film's production (see cancer controversy below) and kept the film from view until 1974 when it was first broadcast on TV. The Conqueror, along with Ice Station Zebra
, is said to be one of the films Hughes watched endlessly during his last years.

Cancer controversy

The movie was mostly shot on location in St. George, Utah, downwind of the U.S. Government's Nevada Test Range, the site of extensive above-ground nuclear weapons testing during the 1950s. The cast and crew spent many difficult weeks on the site, from which Hughes later shipped 60 tons of dirt back to Hollywood for reshoots. The cast and crew knew about the nuclear tests (there are pictures of Wayne holding a geiger counter during production) but the link between exposure to radioactive fallout and cancer was less understood then.

All of the performers named above died of cancer. Powell died only a few years after the picture's completion. Hayward, Wayne, and Moorehead all died in the mid 1970s. Pedro Armendáriz was diagnosed with kidney cancer four years later and committed suicide after he learned the cancer was terminal. Skeptics point to other factors such as tobacco use (Wayne was a heavy smoker) and the fact that radiation-caused cancer does not have such a long incubation period. The cast and crew totaled 220. Of that number, 91 had developed some form of cancer by 1981 and 46 had died of cancer by then. However, striking as this seems, it is unclear if the incidence of cancer among them was truly higher than might be statistically expected for any group of people working in that profession during the 1950s.

Dr. Robert Pendleton, Professor of biology at the University of Utah, has described the incidence of cancer among cast and crew of The Conqueror
as an "epidemic".

Noting that 91 members of the cast and crew had contracted cancer by 1984, with more than half of them dying, Dr. Pendleton stated, "With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you'd expect only 30 some cancers to develop...I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror
would hold up in a court of law."

See Olson, James S. Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer and History, 2002, Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 0801869366

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