My grandfather loved westerns, especially those starring John Wayne. I remember watching these with him, so many that I feel like I had to have seen every film in the man’s filmography. And yet, I somehow can’t recall a single frame of any one of them, nor have I been motivated to see any of those in the intervening decades.
With that, I cannot say for certain the actor delivers his lines in 1956’s The Conqueror in the exact same drawl he used in those other films, but it sure feels like it. That makes for a deeply weird experience, as here he plays Genghis Kahn. With apologies to Devo, he’s a Mongolian—yes, a Mongolian. Angrier than you or me. Curiously, every actor here who says “Mongol” instead sounds like they’re saying “mongrel”. Erring on the side of caution, I will use the latter.
The reputation of this movie precedes it, but nothing can compare to actually seeing it. Really, the stranger experience is hearing it, especially Wayne saying everything in a manner in which you expect him to add “Pilgrim” to the end of every sentence, and every one of those lines is that kind of stilted writing best suited to Biblical epics of the time. I have struggled to find a way to convey in print the awkwardness of his speech, and I must concede defeat. The weirdest aspect of the film is how his delivery ruins every line. No, really, every single line. It is a strange sort of accomplishment.
He isn’t even Genghis Kahn yet in the period covered in this picture. Instead, he is Temujin. Given the ridiculous nature of this enterprise in its entirety, let us recall a different Enterprise, and William Shatner in The Wrath of Kahn. With that, for the rest of this essay, I will refer to Wayne’s character as KAHN!!!
In these early days of KAAHN!!!, he largely engages in blunder and rapine (that being the actual word used in the opening text crawl) with brother Jamuga, played by Pedro Armendáriz. I found it odd that every time somebody says that name, is sound likes “Jamocha”, that chocolate and coffee shake offered at Arby’s. And so, he shall be dubbed Jamocha from here on out. Note that even the name when pronounced as “Jamooga” fits in well in “Kokomo” by The Beach Boys. There is also a younger brother played by Wiliam Conrad, far younger and thinner than he was in TV’s Jake and the Fatman, yet he shall be Fatman forthwith.
The actual leader of the mongrels at that time is Thomas Gomez’s Wang Kahn. Every time somebody said his first name, my brain filled in “Chung” for the last. Wang Chung and the mongrels have as their most hated enemy the Tartars, and long to exterminate them, instead of just practicing Tartar control. Then KAAAHN!!! is smitten by the daughter of the enemy’s leader and so declares, “I feel this Tartar woman is for me.”
Tartar Woman, forgotten mascot of good dental hygiene, is played by Susan Hayward. This redhead stands out in a sea of yellowface. Her abductor’s mother is Agnes Moorehead, and she is not pleased to see her son has taken as his woman the daughter of the man who killed his father. It is so strange to see an actor who was in Citizen Kane engage in this bizarre banter with Wayne: “A fair prize, my son, if my eyes see well.” “I should say so, my mother.” I swear every line he delivers to her ends with “my mother”, or it at least feels like it. Also, isn’t it oddly fascinating a film about the future Genghis Kahn that shows him as being a mama’s boy?
The central conflict of the film will be whether or not Jamocha has betrayed brother KAAAAHN!!!. Then there’s the fight against the Tartars, who briefly enslave our hero, resulting in him in the lead of bulls pulling Tartar Woman’s carriage, curiously bringing to my mind Tom Hardy strapped to the front of a car in Fury Road. Alas, Wayne is never called “Bloodbag” by anybody, nor does anybody shout “WITNESS!” KAAAAAHN!!! will escape his captors just after their leader decides to “Fetch the bear! We’ll have game!” And yes, they actually have a captive bear. Alas, we do not get to see KAAAAAAHN!!! and the bear engage in some one-on-one hoops, which I assume is what they have in mind when they say they got game.
Throughout all this, he keeps raping Tartar Woman and yet is confused why she doesn’t like him more. She shows no reaction whatsoever when he first forces a kiss on her and his expression reads like “Hello? Is this thing on?” As if this treatment of her isn’t bad enough, the next time we see her after her capture, her manner of dress has changed from that of Roman high society to crude furs out of The Flintstones. I like to think he promised to keep her in furs and this was the reality. In one scene, she will inexplicably be clad in a dress that looks like something from the Victorian period.
Speaking of reality, the production is as far from it as one might expect. I’m sure it is as true to life for Mongolians of any era as a Mongolian grill restaurant is today. Some of the extras are made up in such a bizarre manner that I suspect this was a prototype of the Klingon makeup, though Star Trek was more than a decade in the future. The text crawl at the beginning informs the audience this is a work of fiction, though what follows could not be more obviously fabricated than if it included aliens riding on the backs sea serpents.
The opening crawl is odd in a couple of regards. The awkward wording in it foretells the same quality in the dialogue to follow, with such as the phrase “out of this welter of treachery.” There’s also a weird twitchiness in the image at this point, which I suspect in color separation of the layers of the print. For a second, I thought this was in 3-D and I had forgotten to put on my glasses.
Fortunately, the quality of the rest of the print is quite good. Again like Biblical epics of the time, the size of the sets and the sheer number of extras mean the money spent on the production is in plain sight. It is the kind of picture where vast armies charge at horseback towards each other, and I’m always disappointed they don’t just ride past in each other and then come to a screeching halt in bewilderment. The Cinemascope presentation is one of the widest widescreen formats I have seen on blu-ray. All of this makes it odd to see the RKO logo at the start of the film, and it is the first time I can recall seeing it in color. The classic radio tower in the background even has concentric circles and sparkling lightning bolts shooting from the top of it.
Speaking of radiation, the shoot was in an area of Utah downwind from nuclear weapon testing. As if that wasn’t bad enough, tons of the sand from that area was brought back to Hollywood for reshoots. A great many of those involved in the production died of cancer, though many of those cases were lung cancer and almost everybody smoked back then. It is hard to determine how much the radiation exposure on the shoot contributed to those eventual deaths, but I’m sure it contributed. Producer Howard Hughes bought back as many of the prints as possible, and it is widely speculated he did this out of guilt. Really, given his eccentricity, it is impossible to know his motives.
Fortunately, we still have at least one print in existence, and I am pleased The Conqueror has been preserved on blu-ray. It is awful, but largely uniquely so. The reason to see it is Wayne’s bizarre performance in a legendary moment of miscasting. Outside of that, it scans like a hybrid of western and Biblical epic, and with the worst aspects of each. Like Abe Lincoln in Illinois, it is also curiously focused on the era before the era for which the main character is legendary. The ending is the beginning of the really interesting period, after Wang Chung is dead, Jamocha has been banished and, at the head of the army on its way to conquer Asia, we find Tartar Woman and KAAAAAAAHN!!!
Dir: Dick Powell
Starring John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray