Did We Nuke the Duke?

In 1956 John Wayne made a movie about Genghis Khan, called The Conqueror. This film is interesting for many reasons. It is widely considered to be one of the worst movies of all time, with an aggregate rating of 2.7 at good ol' IMDB. The Duke was preposterously miscast in the lead role as the great Khan, what with his laconic manner of speech and slow Texan drawl. Imagine the following lines as spoken by Big John:

"She is a woman - much woman. Should her perfidy be less than that of other women?"

"Come and take me, mongrels - if you dare. While I have fingers to grasp a sword, and eyes to see your cowardly faces, your treacherous heads will not be safe on your shoulders. For I am Temujin, the Conqueror. No prison can hold me, no army defeat me."

"I feel this Tartar woman is for me, and my blood says, take her. There are moments for wisdom and moments when I listen to my blood; my blood says, take this Tartar woman!"

You get the idea. I have seen this movie and I assure you it is just as unintentionally funny as you are imagining (let's just say that the pull quote on the movie poster in the image at the top of this article perfectly encapsulates the tone of this film).

ANYWAY. What is most interesting about this debacle, for our purposes, is the curious circumstances attending the physical location where this turkey was filmed. It was shot in St. George and Snow Canyon, Utah, which I'm sure is beautiful country. It also unfortunately is downwind from the US government nuclear test range at Yucca Flats, Nevada, which was the site of massive above-ground nuclear testing in the early 1950s Operation "Upshot-Knothole involved a series of 11 such tests in 1953, Operation "Teapot" included a series of 13 nuclear tests in March 1955. There were others, of course.

The resulting massive clouds of fallout deposited dust and other deadly debris in Snow Canyon, where the cast and crew of The Conqueror worked for 13 weeks. The producer of The Conqueror (more on him in a minute) even had 60 tons of "hot" dirt from this godforsaken place shipped back to a Hollywood soundstage so certain scenes in the film could be re-shot after location filming had wrapped.

The potential dangers of all this were well known at the time (Wikipedia even says there are pictures somewhere of John Wayne using a Geiger counter on the set). But the (possible; see below) extent of those dangers and the (again, possible) havoc they would wreak on the cast and crew would have given even The Duke pause had they been known at the time.

Of the 220 people who worked on The Conqueror, 91 had developed cancer by 1981, with 46 of them dying from the disease by then (including John Wayne himself, director Dick Powell, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and dozens of others). 91 out of these 220 people were diagnosed with cancer. 91!! That’s more than 40% of the cast and crew. (Not only that, but supposedly within 30 years of the nuclear testing, nearly half of St. George's residents had also developed cancer.)

The wikipedia entry on this film quotes University of Utah professor Dr. Robert C. Pendleton identified in this 1966 Time article on fallout in Utah as "the University of Utah's top expert on radiology and health" as claiming that "in a group this size you'd expect only 30 some cancers to develop." Dr. Pendleton claimed “With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. [However], the connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively."

CANCER CLUSTER: The occurrence of a larger-than-expected number of cases of cancer within a group of people in a geographic area over a period of time.

It should be noted that smoking was a vice shared by many American adults in the 1950s (Wayne reportedly smoked up to five packs a day), and that cancer caused by radiation exposure tends to manifest rather quickly. Given these factors (and other unknowns, such as the other risk factors faced by the cast and crew, their family histories, etc), the wikipedia entry notes "it is unclear if the incidence of cancer among [the cast and crew] was truly higher than might be statistically expected for any group of people working in that profession during the 1950s." By way of comparison, the age-adjusted cancer incidence rate at the beginning of the current decade (based on cases diagnosed between 2000-2003) was 471.3 per 100,000 men and women per year.

CANCER INCIDENCE: The number of new cancers of a specific site/type occurring in a specified population during a year, usually expressed as the number of cancers per 100,000 population at risk.

Oh yeah: the producer of this ill-fated film? None other than legendary recluse billionaire Howard Hughes, who was reportedly so wracked with guilt over all this that he spent millions of dollars of his own money buying up the rights to the film to ensure it would never be shown after its initial theatrical run (though it was eventually aired on TV in 1974 and pops up from time to time even to this day). It is rumored that Hughes watched the film on a continuous loop in his final years.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Did Utah Kill John Wayne?

The Straight Dope: Did John Wayne Die of Cancer Caused by a Radioactive Movie Set?

NCI Cancer Clusters Fact Sheet

Radioactive I-131 from Fallout

Radiation Exposure Compensation Program

Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION