The Conqueror

The Conqueror (1956)

Runtime: 111 minutes

Directed by: Dick Powell

Starring: John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz, Agnes Moorehead

From: RKO Radio Pictures

Remember this post I made in late August, talking about that awful-looking Genghis Khan movie that’s going to be out on DVD… well, sometime in the future? Here is my take on the John Wayne film that I referenced there.

This movie is about Khan (i.e. Temujin) early in adulthood and how (and this is definitely not a historically accurate movie, as they admitted in the opening crawl) he fell in love with a Tartar woman, who just happens to be the daughter of the guy who killed his father. Yet, he still fell in love with her. Go figure. Their relationship is just ridiculous. He bitch-slaps her and they ridicule each other, and yet they still kiss each other and of course she later falls in love with him. The script was just no good. There’s intrigue and romance and all that, but it’s hollow and stupid, and even though there’s a lot of unintentional humor in the movie, it’s a chore to get through the almost 2 hour runtime in one sitting. Temujin’s brother betrays him… just because. Like I said, no good.

Sure, the southern Utah scenery was pretty (although I have no clue if it looks like Mongolia or not) and the sets and costumes looked nice, and you can see that the movie had money behind it (6 million bucks in 1954 money, which is almost 50 million in 2009 money) but it’s never engaging and the action scenes aren’t even all that thrilling (even though it should have been with all the people involved in the scenes) so that’s a problem.

Another big problem is the casting. The Duke as Genghis Khan doesn’t work, needless to say. There’s a few versions of the story, but he had to make one more movie for RKO and he either wanted or was forced to star in this, playing a role meant for Marlon Brando. The script has him delivering flowery lines such as: “She is a woman - much woman. Should her perfidy be less than that of other women?” and “There are moments for wisdom, Juhmuga, then I listen to you--and there are moments for action--then I listen to my blood. I feel this Tartar woman is for me, and my blood says, 'TAKE HER!” in his trademark drawl and it’s preposterous. Him with his eyes slanted back, a Fu Manchu mustache and the outfits was also preposterous. Susan Hayward as a Tartar (an ancient band of people who live around Russia and those surrounding countries) was laughable as they didn’t even try to make her look ethnic as hey, she looks western European and is a redhead. The rest of the cast is the same and it doesn’t help the film’s credibility at all. So, if you can find it cheap (although you can watch a version of it edited down a few minutes on Google Video) or rent it for a library like I did, if you have the patience for it, you may want to get it and laugh at it. Although…

Considering the fact that some of it was filmed near a nuclear test site and a large number of people in the cast/crew developed cancer later in life, probably due to radiation poisoning, and that sobering fact may make you not enjoy the flick at all if you think about it for too long.

And yet it still looks better than that Khan movie with Charlton Heston and the bad guy from Kindergarten Cop.

If you want to see a better flick with Genghis, check out Mongol. Sure, I'd say it's a little overrated but it's much better than the two movies I've talked about here.

If my Internet doesn't crap out on me due to BrightHouse being brutally incompetent, by the end of the weekend I'll have new stuff posted here.