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Nov 02, 2023

The John Wayne Film That Might Have Been a Nuclear Cancer Epidemic

In the latest Movie Legends Revealed, learn about a John Wayne film that might

In the latest Movie Legends Revealed, learn about a John Wayne film that might have accidentally been part of a nuclear cancer cluster

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Howard Hughes felt so guilty about the possibility that the John Wayne film, The Conqueror, was responsible for a cancer cluster, that he would not allow the film to be shown for the rest of Hughes' life.

Howard Hughes Jr. was born in 1905 to Allene Stone Gano and Howard R. Hughes Sr. The senior Hughes had moved to Texas following the Spindletop oil discovery in 1901. You see, it was not until the 1859 oil strike in Oil Creek, Pennsylvania that petroleum was first found in large enough quantities to become a fuel resource in the United States (before that point, oil was mostly used for lubricants until eventually beginning to be used as a replacement for whale oil for lamps), but the oil industry was mostly in the north until the Spindeltop oil strike in Beaumont, Texas. Hughes Sr. and Walter Benona Sharp patented a special type of drill bit called the "Sharp–Hughes" rotary tri-cone rock drill bit. This drill bit allowed for cutting through rock that other drills had been unable to access, thus opening up so much more drilling possibilities in Texas and the Gulf Coast. Hughes and Sharp then formed the Sharp-Hughes Tool Company, using the novel approach of LEASING the drill bits rather than selling them. Due to the oil boom, the company became extremely successful. Sharp passed away in 1912 and Hughes took over full control of the company (by 1918 he had purchased all of Sharp's stock and had full ownership of the company).

Hughes Sr. died in 1924, leaving his 19-year-old son Howard with 75% of his stake in the company (since legal adulthood was 21 at the time, Hughes had to be declared an emancipated minor after his father's death to inherit the stocks).. The other 25% of the company went to Hughes Sr's parents and his brother. Hughes Jr. quickly bought out the rest of his family to give himself total control of what was, by this point, called the Hughes Tool Company. The young Hughes was now one of the richest men in America, and while he kept the Tool Company for many years (before selling the tools division of his conglomerate for $150 million in 1972), Hughes quickly decided to use his newfound wealth for other things that interested him, including the film industry. He became one of the earliest film tycoons in the 1920s, and remained involved in films until the late 1950s, when he became much more interested in aviation. While he owned RKO Pictures, Hughes still occasionally produced some films on his own, and so after he sold RKO, he controlled the rights to the films that he personally produced. One of the last films that he produced was a 1956 film called The Conqueror

The film would prove to be so controversial that Hughes kept the film from being shown again until after he died. So...what was the deal with The Conqueror?

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Directed by Dick Powell, The Conqueror was the story of the life of Genghis Khan, starring famed Asian-American actor, John Wayne. Obviously, as you might have guessed, that was just a joke, and the Duke was horribly miscast as the Mongolian warlord.

His love interest was played by Susan Hayward, hot off of her fourth Oscar nomination for Best Actress for I'll Cry Tomorrow in 1955 (Hayward had previously been nominated for Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman in 1947, My Foolish Heart in 1949 and With a Song in My Heart in 1952. She ultimately won the Oscar for 1958's I Want to Live!, which, well, will soon be considered an ironic title considering the rest of this story).

The film was a critical failure, especially Wayne's casting as a Mongolian (Wayne loved the script and pushed to be cast in the film, and since he was at the peak of his box office success, it was hard to say no to to the guy), and it was not a particularly popular movie, and its $6 million budget was high for the era, but it at least made a $3 million profit, so it wasn't a total failure. The problem, though, was WHERE the film was filmed.

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You see, the exterior scenes for the film were shot in the Escalante Desert near St. George, Utah. That was just 137 miles downwind from the Nevada National Security Site, where 11 above-ground nuclear bombs were detonated in 1953. The cast and crew spent a good deal of time in the area, and Hughes even had 60 tons of the irradiated dirt shipped back to Hollywood for authenticity in later studio reshoots. Hughes was well aware that the filming location was downwind from the testing, but the government assured everyone in the area that there was no threat to public health.

Well, of the 220 members of the film crew (both actors and behind-the-scenes personnel), 41% (91 total) developed cancer during their lifetime, while 21% (or 35 total) died from it. This included director Dick Powell, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz, Agnes Moorehead and, of course, the film's star, John Wayne (of the top five-billed actors, only Thomas Gomez didn't die of cancer, and he died from a car accident in 1971).

In 1989, People magazine quoted Dr. Robert C. Pendleton, then director of radiological health at the University of Utah, as stating, "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. With 91 cancer cases, I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up in a court of law."

Hughes purchased every print of the film and refused to allow it to air out of guilt for what possibly happened. When he died in 1979, Universal Pictures eventually purchased the film, which hadn't been screened publicly in over twenty years at the time.

The legend is...

STATUS: True

Be sure to check out my archive of Movie Legends Revealed for more urban legends about the world of film. Click here for more legends specifically about John Wayne.

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is [email protected].

CBR Senior Writer Brian Cronin has been writing professionally about comic books for over fifteen years now at CBR (primarily with his "Comics Should Be Good" series of columns, including Comic Book Legends Revealed). He has written two books about comics for Penguin-Random House – Was Superman a Spy? And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed and Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent? And Other Amazing Comic Book Trivia! and one book, 100 Things X-Men Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, from Triumph Books. His writing has been featured at ESPN.com, the Los Angeles Times, About.com, the Huffington Post and Gizmodo. He features legends about entertainment and sports at his website, Legends Revealed and other pop culture features at Pop Culture References. Follow him on Twitter at @Brian_Cronin and feel free to e-mail him suggestions for stories about comic books that you'd like to see featured at [email protected]!