by Ryan Uytdewilligen
Chapter Eight: Deciding on a Desert
The Conqueror was planned to be what Wayne and crew referred to as a “Chinese Western.” Readers may be racking their brain, trying to come up with a proper image of what exactly that could be—arriving at something along the lines of Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson in Shanghai Noon.
Oscar Millard had more of an adventurous Middle Eastern throwback in mind when he started assembling the script, channeling old black and white swashbuckling adventures like Arabian Nights to shape the right aesthetic. But there were just too many troublesome factors to keep the genre focused. With the principal cast locked down—the production designers drove themselves crazy with too little time and too much inspiration on their hands.
The rise of their biggest influence, the biblical epic, was cemented by Cecil B DeMille’s Samson and Delilah in 1949. Realistic stone walls were imitated by cheap foams and lumber. Tattered clothes covered each actor—the extras looked like they were plucked from the Old Testament. Historical period pieces had been a Hollywood staple since day one, but technological restraints and present day distractions were no longer an issue.
With the invention of CinemaScope, an anamorphic lens that sped the aspect ratio, and the peak of Technicolor, a process of dyeing film strips to brighten scenes, the sword and sandal epidemic begun.
What DeMille did so skillfully was pay $10,000 to historian Harold Lamb in 1935 so he could draft up an accurate film treatment. It took over ten years for the film to be released with the famed director ditching production several times; but the wait was worth it as the detailed production value became incomparably immaculate. Earning almost ten times its budget—producers rushed to follow in Samson and Delilah’s successful footsteps as new showy cinematic bells and whistles became readily available. They did not, however, have the luxury of time or the interest to conduct proper research.
No, John Wayne’s Mongol movie was not the first to skewer history. Howard Hawks ripped ancient Egypt apart in 1955’s Land of the Pharaohs; its unknown cast and lack of historic focus failed to make a dent in the box office. Talented thespians like Richard Burton were lambasted for their performance; his role in Alexander the Great was criticized when some felt the thirty-year-old was miscast as a teenager. As we can evidently tell, real life events don’t usually unfold in the most cinematic of ways.
History was rearranged in favor of adding a completely fictional plot for audiences to relate to—usually a romance with a familiar lead. Not just The Conqueror, but all of Hollywood ended up with very distant representations of places and time. Yet, it is these cheesy 1950s tropes that still surface in our minds when we think Roman gladiators or Moses parting the Red Sea.
Think about those sprawling afternoon reruns that play around Easter? Clunky dialogue pontificated in an overdone delivery. A drowning trumpet score kicking off the credits to let the audience know what’s to follow is indeed a film of biblical proportions. Overwhelming amounts of prop waving extras making the environment look lived in. It’s exhaustingly rare for the runtime to be under three hours.
Many of these methods have not aged well as they are now viewed as tedious, corny, and obviously staged. This was not quite the intention.
Escapist stories were created for pure enjoyment and marketed to every soul that had a buck to spare. Factor in the clenching grip of the censorship board who barked at any instance of realistic conflict and the Catholic Church that halted the release of anything immoral. Moviemakers had a lot of folks to answer to and epic films aimed to please all but the historian.
Mervin LeRoy’s Quo Vadis and Henry Koster’s The Robe only furthered this style—raking in a profit comparable to a superhero movie in present day. That reason alone was surely the top ten arguments why the formula didn’t deviate and how they quickly become financial tent poles for the studios. The spectacle of this type of film proved to be an insurmountable road block in television’s runaway success as post-war people sought to have fun and escape; dark detective noir of the 1940s no longer fit the mood.
Film ticket sales had taken a nosedive since 1949; a mixture of television’s seemingly limitless popularly and dwindling cinema quality—big-screen biblical escapism began to lure audiences back by the middle of the decade. This type of film would come at a high cost, but producers like Howard Hughes were willing to take that risk in pursuit of such an enormous return.
RKO board president James R. Grainger was now busy touting to the eye rolling press that The Conqueror would be the biggest adventure of the decade, despite his company providing nothing of merit for far too many years. Joyous that an actual production was on the table, few entrenched behind the scenes believed it would yet get past pre-production.
The Conqueror actually took shape at lightning speed once all of the big names signed on. Grainger’s words, the talk-of-the-town cast, and the sheer grandiosity of a period piece seemed to get the studio head hopeful—a feeling Hughes surely never had since taking over the production company over six years prior.
Early on, Hughes toyed with the idea of personally buying out every single crew and cast member’s contracts just so he could have some peace and quiet to restructure the company. On other days, the aviator apparently expressed that The Conqueror could quite possibly end up being his masterpiece.
Even with a lonely Susan Hayward pining over her divorce, showing up at Hughes’ office drunk and demanding his company, the man refused to part from the task at hand. Via the “eggs in one basket” method, utilizing every resource RKO had left—the whole company ran the risk of collapsing into a penniless laughingstock (more so than it already was) if every detail wasn’t carefully accounted for and The Conqueror wasn’t a success.
With an unrestricted budget that blew past any comparable Radio-Keith-Orpheum project ever made, initial estimates of Hughes’ frivolous spending pointed to a total of $2.8 million ($25 million adjusted for inflation).
The mogul officially gave The Conqueror the green light to go ahead with production in the spring of 1954; hoping box office success would reverse the damage he had done over the past six years and giving cinemagoers the greatest adventure the big screen had ever seen.
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Morale had hit an all-time low at RKO, but the promise of such a large scale production actually going through glistened as a beckon of hope that the company certainly wasn’t licked yet. After all, they had The Duke! John Wayne! The King of the Old West!
Up until that point, the star had not appeared in a period piece other than the old western, the furthest back in history being Colonial America in the 1760s Allegheny Uprising (he was an extra in 1928’s Noah’s Ark).
That’s why The Conqueror was special; a theatrical flex that ruffled his image. Standing in front of the camera and just doing whatever it was he was told wasn’t going to cut it this time around. He was playing a real figure from another era, which required research and dedication to present authenticity.
For such a stable star that didn’t seem to mind typecasting to forgo all that was familiar to him, signs surely pointed to the fact he was interested in shaking up the monotony of Wayne’s career. But for an actor, one that never cared to tinker with the more high-faluten methods of performing arts, to jump into such a vastly different role…could the actor really have taken on such a stretch just for the sake of work?
Sure, Wayne was bound to RKO by contract and wanted to wrap up the deal so he could move on; but one would hope he was at least a smidge excited about branching out. Most critics had been particularly rough on his acting style, expressing that his typecast image came across as flat and emotionless. There was also his quiet desire for recognition from the Academy; a prize he had yet to earn at this point in his career.
“The Academy Awards are important,” Wayne said. “They’ve given size to our industry. They hand us back a little of the dignity I feel we deserve.”
He did repeat that he thoroughly loved the script; something that could have blinded him to the fact that he was not right for any part in that story. Friends and family members have said he was immediately attracted to Khan’s confident characteristics. And to be fair, he did try to pull together a character different from his gunslinger image during rehearsals.
“You’re beautiful in your wrath,” Wayne uttered to himself over and over in attempts to properly recite his dialogue out loud from The Conqueror script.
Lines like “While I live…while my blood burns hot…your daughter is not safe in her tent,” or “She is a woman…much woman! Should her perfidy be less than that of other women?” unsurprisingly did not roll off the actor’s tongue.
With most of Millard’s words separated by ellipsis for dramatic effect, the delivery came out especially flat and drawn out. Every second sentence seemed to end with the words “Tartar woman.” We’ll never know if anyone got to hear Wayne attempt a Mongolian accent—no publicized account of that trial and error moment seems to exist. The dialogue in his own drawl was causing him enough grief to call up the writer days before production began.
“You’ve got to do something about these lines,” Wayne begged Millard over the phone. “I can’t read ‘em.”
The screenwriter insisted that he had already written the script specifically for Wayne and tailored each dramatic syllable for the time period—a style he referred to as “archaic flourish.” He replied by saying he’d have to rewrite the entire script for the actor, something that was way too late in the game to do. Wayne gulped, knowing full well no amount of practice and mouth exercises in the world would help him sound like Genghis Khan.
The movie star began to fear that he may risk alienating his loyal audience with the role, quietly doubting his abilities to portray the great ruler. And that was just how Wayne saw him—great. The acts of rape and slaughter and cannibalism were either dismissed or the facts just generally went unknown to Wayne. Either way, the actor felt some admiration for Khan and deemed him to be a mighty conqueror indeed.
Duke explained his project selection process by saying “I want to play a real man in all my films, and I define manhood simply; men should be tough, fair and courageous, never petty, never looking for a fight, but never backing down from one either.”
In the postwar era, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say America had the general feeling that they were just that. So the character had to reflect strength in as much as a positive light possible. Unlike the pained private eyes of the 1940s and the seismic cinematic shift to come in the 1960s, the films of the 1950s featured few flawed protagonists to a bid to provide more wholesome family entertainment. Recognizing his own limits, even the limits of good and bad taste, Wayne re-examined his Mongol approach and looked to his manly mantra for an answer.
“The way the screenplay read, it is a cowboy picture and that is how I am going to play Genghis Khan,” Wayne announced to Dick Powell. “I see him as a gunfighter.”
The director must have winced, wondering how in the world they could possibly pull that one off. People would expect an actor to adhere to some minimum line of accuracy. But again, in the postwar era, the hero was all the rage; and no one more so than John Wayne could play your true blue American hero. He had fans after all—loyal deep-pocketed fans who adored his westerns.
Susan Hayward was already bringing her tried and true physicality to the screen. She demanded her natural glamorous essence—even in dry and dusty desert sands—was not to be tampered with. The Duke therefore was able to throw all attempts to speak with an accent out the window, which probably in the end for Powell and the team was a blessing in disguise.
Once again, a cowboy he would be; albeit a gun swapped for a sword, and in a picture that had several competing genres. The concoction that became the “Chinese Western” was therefore born—despite the film having nothing to do with China or the west in the first place.
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On the technical side, production was far from a cake walk. Determining that CinemaScope lenses were the only devices fit to capture such an epic image, the overcrowded production quickly became a “too many cooks in the kitchen” scenario.
Joseph LaShelle was a nine time Oscar nominated Director of Photography noted for his work with comedic director Billy Wilder. He had already earned himself an Oscar for his cinematography work on Laura before entering the production via Howard Hughes’ insistence.
William E. Snyder was a resident Director of Photography at RKO who was used to capturing B movies like The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Leo Tover had the longest career of the bunch, starting out in silent pictures like the original Great Gatsby, while Harry J Wild came with a background of Tarzan sequels.
With such varied views of film production, it was evident early on that their ideas were not going to gel—even if co-mingling meant creating something brand spanking new. The majority of movies have one Director of Photography to oversee lenses and lighting; because of his high hopes for such a colossal picture and some cast member clashes along the way, Howard Hughes ended up appointing four.
Perplexing decisions were coming from art decoration where films receive their distinctive aesthetic. Carroll Clark was RKO’s long-term art director, having joined the studio in the early 1930s. He did uncredited work on King Kong, later turning to otherworldly Disney live-action features like Mary Poppins. Albert S D’Agostino had a hand in over 300 RKO films—many noted for his gritty style.
By the time Hughes came along, these two had been paired together for a decade—developing a solid working relationship with a track record of professional experience behind them. Both were applauded for their hand in the Art Deco RKO look under Van Ness Polglase’s decorative movement.
The sleekness radiating from Rogers-Astaire ballrooms to the futuristic RKO logo itself; this was the studio’s image and a staple in these renowned men’s work. Something as massive or ethnic as The Conqueror had rarely come their way before. Their domed tents for the Mongol camp and frivolous golden interiors were partly based on history; the cylindrical nomadic tent structures, known as yurts, were represented to a degree.
But the general atmosphere and extravagancy of the camps catered more-so to general ethnic appeal as the golden production rule clearly demanded them to be exotic and engaging at any cost necessary.
Dick Powell was saddled with the toughest task of all—cohesively bringing these elements together. For a second-time director to be commanding such a big-budget behemoth, help was required to push the project successfully onward.
Powell and Hughes were both producers on the picture, but the eccentric studio head was hardly involved after logistics were finalized; masterpiece or not, Hughes still had an avalanche of lawsuits to fight against and airline operations to attend to.
“Dick, this one’s all yours,” Hughes advised. “Just make the biggest spectacular ever. Don’t worry about the money.”
He was still battling Floyd Odlum for the remaining five per cent RKO stock, which prevented him from being sole owner—offering himself up on the other end of the telephone line when Powell needed help.
Friend and writer Richard Sokolove served as an associate producer on The Conqueror to help with the day-to-day preparations, but he had no other credits to his name. He would only go on to produce Powell’s next picture, making him severely inexperienced and essentially pointless.
Powell’s own side projects may have slowed pre-production from time to time. Through his company, Powell launched a television program through his company called Four Star Playhouse, which starred himself and David Niven in different anthological episodes from 1952 to 1956. Serving as the creator and producer to boot, he reveled in the creative medium—spending more of his knowledge and energy on television than he did his own movie.
Wife June Allyson remembered her husband contending with phone calls all night long when he trudged home from work.
“Day after grueling day, Richard interviewed and screened an army of actors and extras and when he was through, he had seen 2,000 people,” Allyson wrote. “He would come in and say ‘let me sit here in silence’ or ‘just let me eat without talking’.”
The director struggled with round the clock meetings that ranged from script notes to legal roadblocks. Lawfully, if there were going to be horses—and a panther—there had to be a wrangler. Mel Koontz was the absolute best in the business, having famously directed Jackie, MGM’s most prominently remembered lion mascot used for their logo from 1928 to 1956. He could do the job all right, but the question then became—where are all the critters and their riders going to come from?
Linwood Dunn, a pioneer in RKO special effects had been part of the King Kong team. He safely paired Katherine Hepburn with a leopard in Bringing Up Baby, and partook in the mammary debacle in Hughes’ own film, The Outlaw; Dunn was the one who blurred the definition on close-ups of Jane Russell’s cleavage by softening the lens with fabric. He, along with RKO effects artist Daniel Hays carefully staged these looming Mongol battles using Dunn’s own renowned Travelling Matte method.
Through the use of blue screen, actors could be paired with a background—or animal—they themselves were not present with. The photography trick had been used for decades, but would allow for close up shots of actors galloping on fake or single horses in near-seamless shots. Unfortunately, a cumbersome trend that came with these colossal costume dramas was that everything was to be shot on location for grandiose style and excitement.
The Conqueror was no exception and would forgo trickery for prestigious glory; all at the expense of a pretty penny. Dunn’s brilliant cost-effective technology was rendered useless for the sake of authenticity.
Killing John Wayne: The Making of The Conqueror by Ryan Uytdewilligen is available now