Documentary Review: 'The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout'

Are you familiar with an animated character by the name of Bert the Turtle? Bert was created in 1952 and would go on to become famous around the world for quite some time. Today, Bert is among the most infamous, shocking, and notable characters in the history of animation. Bert was not a foil for Bugs Bunny. Bert didn't share the screen with Mickey or Donald or Goofy. Nor was he voiced by the famed Mel Blanc. And, Bert is not famous for being funny or cute.

If you know Bert the Turtle it's because today he's a landmark, an echo of a time when talk of potential nuclear annihilation was everywhere. On a weekly or daily basis, Americans would be reminded of the potential that a nuclear weapon could be dropped on America and that we needed to be ready for it. So as not to terrify children, the Federal Civil Defense Administration hired an animation company to create Bert the Turtle. And Bert would become inextricably linked to one of the most misguided, ludicrous and darkly comic pieces of American propaganda ever created. It's an animated short called Duck and Cover.

The message was that if you are warned that a nuclear bomb was being dropped you should duck down and cover your head. Today, that sounds absurd. And, it was absurd at the time as well. The people who made Bert the Turtle knew this was absurd. They knew that if a nuke was dropped hiding under tables and covering your head was about as effective against a nuclear weapon as an umbrella in a tsunami. The goal was to manipulate children not to fear dying a horrific fiery death. Duck and Cover was created to instill a false n0tion that you could potentially survive the bomb.

Some will argue that this false hope was a necessity. The sword hanging over the head of America, and, indeed, the entire world, was too daunting for the truth to be known. Had Americans been fully aware of the destructive power of the nuclear weapon we might tell our government not to make it or even test the idea. No, a comforting lie was believed to be a necessity for competing with Russia on the weapons front. Thus, the legacy of the cold war, the potential for nuclear annihilation, lives in the animated vision of a little turtle with a helmet on.

But there was a second face of the absurdity of our nuclear propaganda. In 1979 John Wayne passed away. He'd been in his second battle with cancer and this time the disease claimed his life. Though we may not be able to definitively link John Wayne's cancer to the destructive and poisonous nuclear fallout in Nevada and Utah in the 1950s, the evidence in favor of that conclusion is staggering. In 1955 Wayne was hired by Howard Hughes to star in the big budget epic film, The Conqueror.

Today, the legacy of The Conqueror is that of one of the most misguided and terrible films in movie history. The film cast John Wayne, scion of Winterset, Iowa, the most midwestern of midwestern stock, as Ghengis Khan, famed thirteenth century Mongol Emperor. You're right to wince as you read that, it's horrifically racist. Wait until you see the makeup job. Yikes. And then you hear him talk and the reasons why The Conqueror is viewed as an epic misfire becomes all too clear. Add in the legendary Susan Heyward, red headed and New York all the way through, and the picture grows somehow more dire and thoughtless.

The film is a complete joke and has been rightfully mocked by movie watchers since it magically re-emerged to the public on television in the mid-1970s. But wait, the movie was released in 1956, why did it only get rediscovered nearly 20 years later? That story is a small part of the framing device for the new documentary The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout, from director William Nunez. In the documentary we learn that Howard Hughes obsessively watched The Conqueror in his dying days when his mental health had declined and he was hiding away from the world.

Why The Conqueror? Howard Hughes made a lot of movies. Why was he so obsessed with the worst movie he was ever associated with? Some believe that Hughes felt intense guilt over the movie, not for it's horrific racism or general poor quality, but because he knew what had happened to the people who made it. Of the 220 members of the cast and crew of The Conqueror, 91 people developed cancer in their lifetime. 46 people died from cancer including John Wayne, Agnes Moorhead, and director Dick Powell.

You see, Hughes was not merely a Hollywood producer, he worked in the defense industry. He was privy to information that the rest of the public was not aware of. Information like the fact that because of nuclear testing in southern Nevada in the 1950s, a massive cancer cluster had been created. Hughes had personally selected St. George, Utah as the shooting location for The Conqueror. What he didn't know was that St. George was downwind from the southern Nevada desert and that the impact of the nuclear testing had spread radioactive fallout all over St. George and the surrounding areas. Nuclear fallout was everywhere and as the sandstorms of the area blasted cast and crew alike, they did not know they were covered in potentially deadly radioactive material.

Hughes did not know this when he chose the location but he knew it before he died. He knew the danger of nuclear radiation and fallout when he decided to take the highly successful, if poorly received and conceived, The Conqueror out of circulation in the late 1950s. We know this because Hughes spoke to President Lyndon Johnson about the nuclear testing in Nevada in 1968 and asked Johnson to stop the testing. Nuclear testing in Nevada continued into the 1970s. Hughes was likely concerned about the testing on his properties in Las Vegas, Nevada, as much as he was concered about anything, but the meeting reveals that Hughes was aware of the environmental danger, he knew about the members of the cast and crew of The Conqueror who were falling deathly ill with cancer, and Hughes was obsessed with The Conqueror.

John Wayne died from cancer in 1979 and had it not been for Bert the Turtle or the many propaganda campaigns that the American government enacted to downplay the effects of nuclear testing, John Wayne might have become the face of the dangers of the nuclear era in an equally disturbing and distressing way as Bert the Turtle became the face of the dark and horrifying lies that the American government told to sell the American people on the need for weapons of mass destruction. For me, after seeing The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout, John Wayne and Bert the Turtle are inextricably linked in a chain of horror that many still want to hide away and disregard. They are linked to the families of St. George, Utah who have lived under the specter of fallout and cancer deaths for multiple generations with little to no recompense from the government that willfully exposed them to these dangers.

The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout forcefully makes the case that our government remains complicit in the suffering and death of the people of St. George, Utah, southern Nevada, and the cast of The Conqueror. The documentary makes a strong, if circumstantial, case that the very country John Wayne became emblematic of during his career as a Hollywood icon was complicit in his death. It's a stunning, stirring, and compelling documentary. Some will likely respond with the fact that John Wayne was a smoker and that since he died nearly 20 years after making The Conqueror that his death wasn't directly attributable to the nuclear fallout on the set of The Conqueror. I hear you, but his death wasn't the first time he battled cancer. He was also a wealthy man with access to the best doctors and treatments available at the time. But, moreover, he's John Wayne, he's a symbol onto which many things have been projected. In this case, John Wayne stands for the 91 people on the set of The Conqueror who also got cancer in the wake of the film. And he stands for the 46 other cast and crew members who died in the aftermath of the movie as well. Just as Bert the Turtle is a dark symbol of comforting lies about nuclear weapons, John Wayne is symbolic of the deaths caused in the blind, greedy, striving for more ways we can kill each other.

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