The Conqueror (1956)

This Howard Hughes production stands as one of the most infamous films ever made, thanks to a remarkable confluence of on-screen absurdity and suspected off-screen tragedy. The lumbering spectacle was shot in an area close to the testing grounds for the first generation of atomic bombs, and a great number of the cast and crew later died from cancer, including star John Wayne. That link has never been substantiated, but one thing is certain: The Conqueror encapsulates a lot of what was wrong with ‘50s American cinema, as well as a more specific example of why Hughes shouldn’t have been allowed to have anything to do with moviemaking after 1935. Just when you think employing Wayne as Temujin, soon to be Genghis Khan, is the apogee of absurd casting, Susan Hayward turns up as his future wife, the Tartar princess Bortai, red hair, milky Irish-Swedish complexion and all. Both actors are understandably uninspired in a film that plays like a compendium of clichés culled from the previous thirty years of bad historical swashbucklers. Hughes had bought RKO Studios hoping to resuscitate the classic Hollywood filmmaking world he had long toiled at the edges of, as television was corroding its audience. But the product here fairly reeks of the exhaustion of old Hollywood’s familiar hit-making templates, tiredly ticking off the tropes of simplistic macho fantasy and screwball love-hate sexual dynamics in a distant historical realm reimagined in the cheesiest of fashions. The Conqueror is matinee fare, to be sure, but it’s not even good matinee fare.

Wayne’s Temujin is a drawling roughneck with a droopy moustache and a hunting eagle, riding through the desert when he first spots a column of rival tribesmen marching, transporting Bortai to marry another tribe’s leader. Temujin is instantly stricken with erotic obsession and in spite of the warnings of his blood brother Jamuga (Pedro Armendariz), decides to take her captive. Temujin has other motives, wishing to stir up trouble with the other tribes of the Gobi, particularly the Tartars, for Bortai’s father (Ted de Corsia: it’s hard to decide which is funnier, de Corsia playing Hayward’s father, or de Corsia playing a Tartar warlord) murdered Temujin’s. Temujin attacks and slaughters Bortai’s escort, takes her prisoner, and woos her in the old Mongol fashion – with coercion, patronisation, and feasts of yak butter. As the inevitable repercussions of Temudjin’s actions bring the vengeance of the Tartars down on him, Temujin is faced with either seeing his tribe wiped out, or trying to put together a conquering army with the aid of his father’s former ally Wang Khan (Thomas Gomez), and rising to his true stature. The Conqueror was directed by former actor and dancer Dick Powell, who would go on to make the decent submarine drama The Enemy Below (1957), but his direction of this film is leaden, filled with insipid action scenes and slack stunt-work. To his credit, Powell shows some signs of knowing how to shoot spectacle, with some impressive widescreen framings of massed horsemen and that brutally beautiful, irradiated landscape.

Powell’s general lack of inspiration isn’t mysterious, as the heavy hand of Hughes’ sensibility is apparent throughout, with its parade of vulgarities, chauvinism, and opportunism. A lot of time and effort was spent on putting together the physical trappings of the distant, exotic past, and yet where Agnes Moorehead, as Temujin’s mother Hunlun, is swathed in accurate, traditional Mongol dress, Hayward swans about in chichi nightgowns and spangled bikinis. “See to the sharing of the booty,” Temujin orders Jamuga. “What, all of it, my lord?” Jamuga asks, casting a glance at Hayward to her bug-eyed consternation, knowing it’s her booty they’re talking about. “Let your slaves have their sport with her!” Hunlun advises her son. When Temujin first takes Bortai captive, he tears off her dress and gives it to an envoy, forcing her to take shelter under a wool rug and spit threats. The film’s comic highlight is a long sequence in the grand tradition of period movie sexploitation, as Wang Khan’s army of dancing girls perform for him, Temujin, and Bortai. The men’s unflattering comparison of the dancers’ skills and flashing flesh to Bortai’s unresponsive primness inspires her to stage her own performance in order to prove that her milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, wavering swords and red silk in a blissfully hilarious spectacle that ranks with Sophia Loren’s stilted tango in The Pride and the Passion (1958). The film’s swaggering sexism and witless innuendo resolves inevitably in rape fantasy, Bortai succumbing to Temujin’s sweaty charms when he spirits her away to a cave. Thereafter she cannot bear to see him suffer, helping him escape from her father’s sadisms when he’s captured, knowing that inevitably one will kill the other.

Wayne described his approach to capturing the essence of Temujin was to play him as just another gunfighter, and whilst The Conqueror owes much to hoary horse operas, in spite of the fancy dress, Wayne disappointingly displays none of the surprising physical grace and smouldering ferocity that he displayed in the same year's The Searchers. Wayne’s ponderous performance, reciting lines that might have bought out the natural ham in many other actors (“I feel this Tartar woman is for me, and my blood says take her!”), shows signs of some effort on his part to underplay a role that was quite unsuited both to his ethnicity, obviously, and also to his igneous acting style. Armendariz, as Jamuga, tries to make up the difference by expending twice the energy, but his thankless part conspires against him. It’s worth mentioning that this film’s basic story elements and images aren’t really so different from Sergei Bodrov’s over-rated but superior and at least ethnographically accurate Genghis Khan biopic, Mongol (2007), detailing similar rituals of Temujin’s being taken captive, ill-treated, trying to survive in the rugged and unforgiving landscape and the blatantly inhumane lifestyle of the Gobi tribes, and contending with the impressive but morally null outposts of Chinese culture. Temujin is involved in the chicanery of a shaman (John Hoyt) who plots to use him as a tool to unseat Wang Khan, leading to the only scene that generates any tension, in which the shaman tries to kill Wang Khan before Temujin can learn the truth from him. The subplot of Temujin and Jamuga’s troubled relationship, constantly beset by mistrust and cross-purposes that lead Temujin to repeatedly assume his friend is betraying him, leads to a ludicrous climax in which Jamuga begs to be put to death rather than distract his brother again. The flaccid plot finishes up with a big, clanging battle only distinguished by its lack of distinction. The film as a whole is cardboard, one-note, silly, and barely entertaining. Wayne reportedly wanted to negotiate holding the premiere in Moscow, as a peace gesture and cultural tribute to the ancestors of the modern Russia, but it’s a good thing that never went through, for the Commies might just have dropped the bomb if forced to sit through this.