“Rough all round”: the 1956 John Wayne movie that is linked to almost 50 deaths
While Hollywood has always been more than the sum of its parts, it wouldn’t be the slightest of exaggerations to suggest that at one point in time, John Wayne was bigger than Hollywood.
‘The Duke’ became the face of Hollywood at a crucial time when it was trying to find its identity, especially through the westerns he made that America was more than happy to pump out in huge batches to show the world “the American way”. Of course, a lot of them haven’t really aged well, given that they are built on the inherently racist foundations of a genre co-opted by the politics of colonisation, but neither has Wayne’s legacy.
Two things can be true at the same time: John Wayne played a major role in shaping the mould of the anti-heroes yet to come, and John Wayne was a McCarthyist bootlicker whose pathetic and shameless snitching jeopardised the lives and careers of countless colleagues. Allegedly ending up on Stalin’s KGB hitlist, Wayne would have liked to believe that he was everything that America stood for, except he would have quickly sat back down if he were actually faced by Soviet assassins.
Unfortunately, 91 out of Wayne’s 220 co-workers also didn’t age well after working on The Conqueror, Dick Powell’s 1956 historical epic that is almost never mentioned when discussing the Hollywood star’s extensive filmography. That is, except when it comes to the longstanding controversy that the locations where the production took place exposed its crew to enhanced cancer risks.
When casting John Wayne as Genghis Khan is not even remotely the worst thing about your movie, you know you’ve really fucked up. Of course, it was hated by critics who thought it was among the worst releases of the decade, but time has shown that The Conqueror was much more than just a bad and racist flick, it was lethal.
“It was a miserable shoot all around,” writer Ryan Uytdewilligen, author of the book Killing John Wayne: The Making of The Conqueror recalled. “Susan Hayward was drinking and trying to allegedly have an affair with John Wayne. Second-time director Dick Powell was so in over his head, he wasn’t sleeping. Harsh weather conditions in Utah were harming the cast and crew. It was rough all around.”
To add to all of this, the filming locations in Utah were in close proximity to nuclear testing sites, which is why when it was later discovered that 46 crew members had died of cancer, people began looking deeper into what exactly had happened. According to Uytdewilligen, the producers of the film as well as the cast knew what they were getting into, but also not completely.
The author added, “The location scouts did bring this to attention to the producers who deemed it safe. The cast and crew got worried when they arrived and heard this from the locals, but ultimately, Howard Hughes called up the Atomic Energy Commission and was assured there would be no problems. Any link or danger from radiation was not known for at least a decade after.”
While some have dismissed these links as spurious because some of the crew admitted to heavy use of tobacco, the percentage of people working on The Conqueror who succumbed to cancer and their younger-than-average age of demise have kept these controversies alive. Even Wayne died of stomach cancer later in his life, but before that, he made sure everyone forgot about the disaster that was The Conqueror by making The Searchers the same year.
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