This Golden Turkey embarrassment is far too entertaining to be dismissed as a mere Bad Movie — Howard Hughes’ ode to Mongol barbarians does have perhaps the worst-cast star role of all time, and every third dialogue line is fall-down hilarious, but it’s great fun. John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Pedro Armendariz give it their best. So do a dozen tough guys from westerns and war films, outfitted in the weirdest costumes imaginable. The joke’s not on any of them — we applaud their commitment. Dick Powell’s second units whip up fine action sequences, churning up that red Utah dust — that was lethally radioactive.

The Conqueror
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1956 / Color/ 2:55 widescreen / 111 min. / Street Date February 25, 2025 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz, Agnes Moorehead, Thomas Gomez, William Conrad, John Hoyt, William Conrad, Ted de Corsia, Leslie Bradley, Lee Van Cleef, Peter Mamakos, Leo Gordon, Richard Loo, Charles Horvath, Jarma Lewis, Torben Meyer, George E. Stone, Max Wagner, Patrick Wayne, Michael Wayne.
Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle, William Snyder, Leo Tover, Harry J. Wild
Art Director: Albert S. D’Agostino, Carroll Clark
Editorial Supervisor: Stuart Gilmore
Film Editor: Robert Ford, Kennie Marstella
Original Music: Victor Young
Assistant & Second Unit directors: Edward Killy, Cliff Lyons
Written by Oscar Millard
Presented by: Howard Hughes
Produced and Directed by Dick Powell

By 1954 Howard Hughes’ RKO was hemorrhaging money, turning out fewer pictures of its own and scoring almost no hits. Hughes had a habit of not releasing potentially profitable pictures. He considered junking the excellent  The Narrow Margin and remaking it with bigger stars; it was sidelined for almost two years. He reshot parts of  The Man He Found to invert its politics; its release was delayed as well. The biggest waste of money was the expensive aerial epic  Jet Pilot, which began filming in 1949 but didn’t see release until 1957. Hughes tinkered with rewrites and reshoots for years, until the jets depicted were way out of date.

Did the playboy tycoon dabble in moviemaking just to amuse himself — and have better access to starlets?  Did he run RKO into the ground, to create a monster tax write-off for for his other business interests?

Another sinkhole for RKO finances was 1956’s The Conqueror.  Produced and directed by actor-turned-director Dick Powell, it was ‘presented’ by Howard Hughes, who reportedly guided the show from the sidelines. A history-challenged account of the salad days of the Mongol chieftain Genghis Khan, it was filmed on location in CinemaScope and released in Technicolor and stereophonic sound. The advertising bragged that it cost six million dollars, money that RKO couldn’t spare. Hughes had actually sold the studio in mid-1955, making this his final film production.

Did the stars John Wayne and Pedro Armendariz each owe RKO a film?  If not, their services may have been as expensive as the fee to borrow top star Susan Hayward from 20th Century Fox. The show was not a hit, but Hughes liked it so much that he bought it from RKO and locked it away in his vault of personal productions, along with  Hell’s Angels,  Scarface and  The Outlaw. In the early 1980s at the New Beverly Theater, I once witnessed Sherman Torgan forced to cancel a screening of Hughes titles — a Caddo Company attorney had shown up with a cease and desist order.

John Wayne wasn’t always taken seriously, but he was never a clown.

The Conqueror did play a number of times on Los Angeles TV channel 9 in the 1960s. But it remained obscure until earning special mention in the Medved Brothers’ 50 worst films of all time book. It’s far from being that bad, even with the outrageously inappropriate casting of its leading man. The idea of John Wayne playing a young Genghis Khan under exotic makeup should have been dismissed as a joke. The standard Wayne movie poster showed him throwing an All-American punch, like Popeye. Despite making all kinds of movies, he was typed as a western star. Almost every review called The Conqueror a western in disguise. Its impressive vistas were filmed on location in Utah … photogenic country for a western.

But the show is really an outgrowth of the exotic costume adventure. Every studio made a few, but in the subgenre was dominated by Universal. Starting with Jon Hall or  Maria Montez, they always had a Technicolor fantasy on offer. The early 1950s saw more movies with Arabian heroes or knights in armor, frequently played by Tony Curtis. Universal’s biggest costume epic in this vein may have been an inspiration for The Conqueror:  1954’s relatively expensive The Sign of the Pagan was directed by Douglas Sirk in CinemaScope and Technicolor. It starred Jack Palance as Attila the Hun. If the movie had to be made, that’s pretty good casting.

The Howard Hughes film is more expensive, more violent, and ten times as absurd. The stylized ‘Mongolian’ dialogue in the screenplay by Oscar Millard has more unintentionally funny lines than any big picture we can think of.

Just the same, the uniquely weird The Conqueror is compellingly watchable … we found ourselves highly entertained by its cast of favorite stars, stumbling through an awkward pageant. None lets the team down.

Mongolia is a patchwork of warring tribes, just crying to be united by the toughest hombre North of the picket wire meanest warlord in the Gobi Desert. Backed by his loyal blood brother Jamuga (Pedro Armendariz) and his birth brother Kasar (William Conrad), the Mongol sub-chieftan Temujin (John Wayne) seeks to avenge his father’s death. When he catches the Tartar lord Targugai (Leslie Bradley) on Mongol land, Temujin leads an ambush and steals Tartugai’s bride-to-be, Bortai (Susan Hayward). Both Jamuga and Temujin’s mother Hunlun (Agnes Moorehead) object, as Bortai is the daughter of Kumlek (Ted de Corsia), the Tartar who killed Temujin’s father. Bortai fiercely defies her new husband, but the patient Temujin is convinced that she’ll warm up to him.

Temujin’s plan is to join the tribes of the Gobi, defeat the Tartars, and become the Top Khan of the whole shebang. To do this he must convince the powerful chieftain Wang Khan (Thomas Gomez) to join in the fight. But the Khan’s shaman (John Hoyt) has other ideas, and betrays both Temujin and his master. How many palace dances, bloody tortures, and mounted battles will it take for Temujin to ‘find his destiny’ and become Genghis Khan?

Howard Hughes’ previous Technicolor foray into costume fantasy was 1955’s Son of Sinbad. Its claim to fame is as a girlie show. Endless boudoir, dance and bathtub scenes are decorated with scantily clad beauties, beginning with Lili St. Cyr. Hughes held it up for at least a year, filming suggestive dances in 3-D; by the time it was released, the 3-D fad had passed. Son of Sinbad is a light comedy with a sense of humor, greatly aided by a hammy performance by Vincent Price. The Conqueror is completely serious at all times. For many audiences, it comes off as unintentionally funny.

The girlie show business in The Conqueror is mostly limited to one scene in Wang Khan’s palace, where the harem girls put on a dance. The slinky costumes push the edge of the envelope for such spectacles. The movie stops for several minutes for Sylvia Lewis’s burlesque dance turn, which plays as halfway elegant. Perhaps to please the censors, the CinemaScope camera stays at a discreet distance from the chorus. We can’t identify the harem dancers, said to include Jarma Lewis and Barrie Chase.

Temujin and his pals have a rough time of it in old Mongolia … every reel features a battle, a chase, a hero in chains, or a teased almost-rape scene. Temujin claims his ‘woman’ by ripping off her dress in one big YANK, and throwing it at her Tartar bridegroom:  “Keep this to remember her by, Targutai!”  Temujin’s brawny brother Kasar can bend iron bars to help Jamuga escape from the Shaman’s dungeon; we lose track of how many times Temujin and Jamuga escape while being prepared for execution.

The battles in the red desert rocks don’t  “Surpass Anything Ever Filmed Before!”  as claimed in RKO’s hyped trailer, but the action is big-scale. With as many as 150 horsemen to work with, Second Unit Director Cliff Lyons recreates some of the ‘mass ride’ shots from Selznick’s  Duel in the Sun, especially tilted angles that exaggerate horses riding down steep slopes. The battle scenes are packed with Lyon’s precise horsefall gags, and riders yanked from their saddles by hidden wires. We see the same rodeo-grade horse action he later arranged for Jack Cardiff’s  The Long Ships and Sam Peckinpah’s  Major Dundee, including multiple horsefall gags.

Side note: this is one of the few pictures in which we note that ‘the wrong kind of horses’ are on view. The Gobi horsemen — the light cavalry that conquered much of the known world — all ride what I think are quarter horses suitable for a Texas cattle drive. No wonder The New York Times dismissed the film as ‘simply an Oriental Western.’  Anyone who’s read about Mongolia in old issues of National Geographic has seen photos of short, tough men riding short, tough horses with lots of extra hair. (End ignorant horse talk.)

As in most ’50s films, the promised gruesome tortures are mostly addressed in dialogue bites. Jamuga is staked out to be quartered, while Temujin is tied to a yoke and made to pull an ox wagon. Seeing John Wayne covered in Mongol-face makeup and dripping with blood, we can’t help but be reminded of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the much later  Conan the Barbarian.

The surprise is that most of The Conqueror is is great fun. Unless jeering at John Wayne is a knee-jerk response, it’s difficult not to be impressed by the earnest performances. Wayne clearly gives his all to the cardboard role of Temujin; it’s just an acute case of Toxic Miscasting. He snarls out line after line of indigestible ‘barbarian speak,’ and makes it all coherent. Temujin’s one-dimensional motivations are clear as well.

We’d have to think that John Wayne was pulled in by an attractive paycheck; perhaps he wanted to pitch Howard Hughes to bankroll his pet project, a giant epic about The Alamo. This movie can’t have helped the false public perception that Wayne was a bad actor. It preceded his career peak  The Searchers by several months. Could it have contributed to the pass given that movie come Oscars time?

Susan Hayward is a committed pro all the way. She must work hard to animate the sultry Bortai, a humorless dame with good reasons to be constantly angry. Hayward somehow keeps the role from becoming a complete joke. We’ve seen Hayward survive plenty of soap opera dramas that were almost as risible; every trailer for a Susan Hayward picture has her belt out at least one awful dialogue zinger.

Nope, Hayward can’t be accused of holding back. She’s an enthusiastic participant in the bit where Temujin rips her dress off, an action so abrupt that it’s hilarious. Hayward also follows the statuesque dancers out onto Wang Khan’s runway. At a tiny 5 foot 3 inches, she doesn’t let herself be directly compared to the leggy chorus girls. She does a few quick dance undulations, juggles a pair of knives, and then tosses one at the leering Wang Khan.

Bortai’s conversion from Temujin hater to Temujin worshipper is as klunky as in any he-man testosterone epic: hiding from some pursuers in a rocky ditch, Bortai resists the Mongol’s crushing embrace for about 2.5 seconds, and then lets chemistry take over. Such seduction clichés have motivated newer generations of women to reject a lot of Hollywood romances as fundamentally invalid. Remember guys, even if the girl hates your guts, physically overpowering her is the sure path to true love.

Pedro Armendariz carries the story’s ‘brotherly’ conflict with ease, resisting Bortai’s enticements to betray Temujin. His character Jamuga is caught in a royal bind, a ‘code of the Gobi’ catch-22. Jamuga stays true to his blood brother, but the mere fact that Temujin had doubts behooves Jamuga to atone in a grossly disproportionate way. Is this a barbaric ‘honor system?’  A similar downer sacrifice in Richard Brooks’  Lord Jim feels equally unnecessary. Temujin and Bortai should object — as we all know, noble Jamugas don’t grow on trees.

For that matter, I’m not sure we see a single tree in The Conqueror. Where do the Mongolians get their wood?

For fans of American action and crime genres, The Conqueror will entertain simply as a spotting quiz: it’s loaded with familiar tough-guy faces, in outrageous costumes or makeup. Powerful actor Thomas Gomez is the roly-poly Wang Khan, whose very name can be counted on for a rowdy laugh every time it is repeated. The talented John Hoyt clearly has a ball in an elaborate mandarin makeup.  →  He even skillfully mounts and rides a camel. Chubby William Conrad is a hoot, bending iron bars bare-chested; he and Pedro Armendariz are an impressive Away Team, falling into the clutches of the enemy.

Favorite Ted de Corsia wears a big facial scar, but mostly stands around chortling at the imprisoned Temujin. Future star Lee Van Cleef and his hawk nose are given a lot of early screen time as Temujin’s main captain, until an unfortunate ambush sees him replaced by the less familiar but equally nose-endowed Pete Mamakos.

Poor Leslie Bradley gets the thankless role of a cuckold and a coward; the accomplished actor would proceed to roles in two separate Roger Corman non-epics. And we immediately recognize the rough voice of Leo Gordon, a mob enforcer Tartar captain for Ted de Corsia. Gordon wrote several movies for Corman.

We found that we enjoyed The Conqueror, even while admitting that its repetitious escapes, chases and battles drag it out an extra reel or two. It’s never truly boring, quite the opposite. It just needs some new ad taglines: “Come see the worst Hollywood epic ever made!  See John Wayne humiliate himself!”  And reconsider what makes the difference between a big stupid show everybody laughs at, and other big stupid shows that many accept as classics.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray finally gives The Conqueror a respectable video transfer with a big-screen look. Colors overall are acceptable, approximating the original Technicolor. The ruddy Utah rocks and sand look great; the RKO interiors back on Hollywood interiors don’t try for more realism. The show had four different directors of photography, likely because Howard Hughes’ reshoots stretched out for months.

Part of the main titles, a text scroll setting the scene, drops in quality and is very unsteady. Although the picture overall is mostly excellent, that footage and some opticals and transitions later on drop in quality. Perhaps some damaged original negative had to be replaced with down-generation dupe material. The final shot really suffers. It’s a complex Linwood Dunn optical that makes 150 Mongol troops look like a thousand, stretching back into distant mountains. Other optical trick shots are nearly undetectable, like a pan across the desert that adds dozens of yurt tents to a Mongolian encampment.

The films personally owned by Howard Hughes weren’t maintained with the rest of the RKO library as it passed on to subsequent rights holders, so we’re lucky the film has survived at all. We’re told that original prints were in stereophonic sound — magnetic, we assume?  All of those materials may be lost as well.

The Conqueror was filmed in the original extra-wide CinemaScope aspect ratio of 2.55:1. The scan on the disc may not be quite that wide. The image shows the expected flaws of early CinemaScope. The optical field is not flat, so parts of shots stretch and compress every time the camera pans. The vertical lines of walls in Wang Khan’s palace are never straight, but tilt or bow. And objects and people at the extremes of the frame can be very skinny, especially at the left. It’s not a good thing to have Susan Hayward stuck in at the far left of an ultra-wide composition, looking as if she were disappearing into the center fold of a magazine.

The movie doesn’t have a lot of close-ups.  ‘The CinemaScope Mumps’ problem is mostly under control, but several tight shots of John Wayne squash his head out ever so slightly. (We’ve slightly squeezed the frame grab above, to put the Duke back in shape.) ↑   It reminds us that the old anamorphic optics added subtle distortion to everything.

Kino adds an original trailer, with its hyped text, and the rude shot of the Temujin-Bortai ‘meet cute’ where he rips her tunic off. David Del Valle offers an audio commentary, aided by his colleague Dan Marino. They know a yurt when they see one. The slip-cover appears to source new vintage art from the film — a far better graphic than the one-sheets from 1956.  →

Although the Atomic Curse of The Conqueror usually gets first mention, we’ve left it for the finish. The basic sad story can be read  here  and  here. The movie company filmed for weeks in a ‘hot’ area of Utah, downwind of a major atom testing range. RKO then shipped tons of irradiated red desert dirt back to Hollywood, to use on sound stages. It wasn’t until the 1980s that investigative articles revealed that the rumors were true: twenty years later, many of the movie’s cast and crew had died of cancer, including the top stars and the director — too many cancer fatalities to be attributed to coincidence.

It became personal when we read that, after filming ended, all that dirt had been given to local nurseries. RKO was only 3 blocks away — was our entire neighborhood therefore radioactive, a Hollywood Chernobyl?  No, if that were the case Culver City would be the locality directly affected — interiors and pickups for The Conqueror were filmed at RKO’s Pathe lot, not here in Hollywood.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Conqueror
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Ver-ry interesting!
Video: Very Good +
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with David Del Valle and Dan Marino
Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: February 20, 2025
(7281conq)

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