The techniques of make-up and special effects that exist today allow it to be believable that a 1.80-meter-tall actor plays the dwarf Gimli or that an actress becomes an inhabitant of a distant planet, blue in color and with strange features. Unfortunately, in the 50s these techniques were not as developed and perhaps that was one of the reasons for the failure of The Conqueror, a film that unsuccessfully tried to make John Wayne convincing in the role of the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan that he played in the film. .
The Conqueror It was a blockbuster produced by billionaire Howard Hughes, directed by Dick Powell and starring the stars of the time John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Pedro Armendáriz. However, as we have said, the film was an absolute failure at the box office and would have been forgotten if it were not for a circumstance completely unrelated to the blockbuster itself.
Sometimes the news of the death of a member of the shooting of a film jumps, usually that of a specialist who perishes in the recording of a risky scene of the film that does not turn out as expected. However, neither The Conqueror It was a film with particularly dangerous action scenes, and no member of his team died during filming, whose exteriors were recorded in the Utah desert, which was considered a location with similarities to the Mongolian steppe that it tried to reproduce. The shooting of the movie ended and the crew left Utah.
What nobody counted on is the fact that in the neighboring State of Nevada, and also in its desert, the United States armed forces had been carrying out secret tests in which nuclear weapons were used. The radioactive cloud generated by these weapons reached the locations where the film was shot and ended up affecting different members of the The Conqueror filming team over the years. who were in Utah.
It is difficult to determine how many people on the team who developed cancer in the following years did so as a direct consequence of the radioactivity emitted by the nuclear weapons tested in the desert, but some studies indicate that the fact that 91 members of the filming (including John Wayne and Susan Hayward) contracted some type of cancer and died as a result of it (Pedro Armendáriz committed suicide when he found out he had cancer), far exceeds the average probabilities that would have occurred if they had not been subjected to the radioactive cloud generated by the nuclear weapons tests. What is certain is that with this background and its null results at the box office, The Conqueror It has earned the title of "cursed film".
I learned about this story through the interesting classic black novel Lethal as a solo by Charlie Parker reviewed in my reading blog, which I recommend to lovers of the genre.
Image| The Conqueror