Synopsis
GENGHIS KHAN! The world trembled at his name!
Mongol chief Temujin battles against Tartar armies and for the love of the Tartar princess Bortai. Temujin becomes the emperor Genghis Khan.
1956 Directed by Dick Powell
Mongol chief Temujin battles against Tartar armies and for the love of the Tartar princess Bortai. Temujin becomes the emperor Genghis Khan.
Le Conquérant, El conquistador de Mongolia, Sangue de Bárbaros
Gods of Egypt: I cast Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton as Moses and Rameses, clearly I am the king of racial miscasting.
Aloha: Bitch please, I cast Emma Stone for a Hawaiian-Chinese-Swedish character, checking off exactly zero boxes, so I'll take that crown, thank you.
Prince of Persia: I literally have the nationality in my title and I cast two American actors. Step off, Aloha.
21: Don't even "Persia." At least your characters were fictional, I replaced real Asian-Americans with white dudes, ya bastard.
Face of Fu Manchu: I made Christopher Lee a Chinese guy. The white to Asian trophy belongs to me, you poser.
Breakfast at Tiffany's: Did someone say whites replacing Asians? Erm, I'm the king of that, so thank ru, come again.
This Conqueror: Hold my motherfuckin' beer...
I have read about this movie for years...and today I was finally able to watch it. According to my John Wayne Cogerson Movie Score page...this is the worst John Wayne movie of his career according to critics and audiences. In this one Wayne plays Genghis Khan and Susan Hayward plays his wife. The good: Costume design, movie locale and the amount of extras used is impressive. The bad: Casting is horrible....John Wayne playing the head of the Mongrels...just plain silly, the dialogue is even sillier and the action sequences are pretty lame. Final thoughts of review: Not as bad as I thought it would be....but certainly not a good movie.
Some sad history about this movie. From IMDB. The film…
All future lead actor performances will now be evaluated on a scale of There Will be Blood Daniel Day-Lewis - The Conqueror John Wayne
I don’t know who did their job worse, the script writer or the location scout. One probably gave severe brain damage to millions, the other caused cancer in almost half the production crew. Tough call.
This movie is the most puzzling thing I’ve ever watched. As a fan of John Wayne, I can confidently this is the worst movie he ever put out. It is so hilariously bad that I can’t help but enjoy it.
With all time great movies like “The Searchers” and “Red River” coming out in previous years, you can’t help but wonder why The Duke would assume the role of Genghis Khan. It seems so far out of his comfort zone, but Wayne attempts to make this atrocious story bearable for the viewers. He gives an effort to make the movie decent (not in a historically accurate way, but in a good ol’ John Wayne “Howdy Pilgrim” type of way, which…
Might as well acknowledge the elephant in the room: in this movie, John Wayne plays Genghis Khan. Now, is this the single worst casting decision ever? ...yeah, probably. Seriously, seeing John Wayne in mongol gear is such a bizarre sight.
I went into this wondering "is the casting of John Wayne the only really bad thing about it?" The answer is no. Music that signifies a budding romance swells after Genghis rips off Susan Hayward's blouse and exposes her tits to his horde. We get the same treatment when he forces himself on her.
I think that may be the best example of why this is so bad: it's an incredibly inappropriate handling of this story. A story about people…
"She is a woman, Jamuga. Much woman. Should her perfidy be less that that of other women?"
Auteurism so vulgar that it literally poisoned and eventually killed the single greatest movie star who has ever walked the Earth! Howard Hughes and John Wayne are probably chilling right now in Heaven, drinking their hearts out, laughing down at all the miserable farts who cannot relax and enjoy a handsomely mounted, majestically scored, high camp, old school adventure (or just the presence of the red wildcat Susan Hayward). Has an actual Mongolian ever been asked about the "non-troversial" casting choices and if the Duke made their people proud in the role? That will be the day...
Never mind the fact that this is glorifying one of the most evil men in human history -- this movie is filled with so much racism, I'm surprised John Wayne didn't look right at the camera and shout, "Ching chong, Pilgrim!"
A trainwreck of historic proportions.
Where do I start with this one? A pet project of reclusive aviator Howard Hughes (his last production in fact) this western epic from director Dick Powell cost $6 million to make, and premiered in February of 1956. Clearly blinded by its recognizable stars audiences helped this clumsy film earn some $9 million in proceeds. The approved-rated story hilariously features John Wayne in the title role as Temujin - a Mongol warrior in the 13th century who would rise to power to become Genghis Khan.
Let that sink in for a minute... America's most recognizable cowboy, at the prime of his career, was selected to play an Asian warrior. Racial insensitivity notwithstanding, this might be…
This film is embarrassing and hard to watch, an all-time low for John Wayne and his costars. Hearing how most people involved with its production suffered with cancer and radiation poisoning from the production's close proximity to a nuclear test site is honestly one of the most tragic behind the scenes stories of any film production I've ever heard. This is a cursed film that was not worth anyone dying over.
“Dance Tartar Woman! Dance for Temujin!” – John Wayne, in yellowface, as a romanticized version of Genghis Khan, to a half-naked Susan Hayward.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, folks.
Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss list The Conqueror in their book The 50 Worst Films of All Time. I think that's a bit ungenerous. Is it a good movie? Not really. Is it one of the worst of all time? No. James V. D'Arc says, "The movie would become one of the most expensive Hollywood films made up to that time, as well as one of the select few Hollywood movies to become an object of derision and satire" (88).
I'm not sure if The Conqueror was released before or after The Ten Commandments (1956), but it feels a lot like a biblical movie. If you can get past an entire troupe of Caucasians trying to pass themselves off as…
Got a VCR for Christmas. What's up with you?
Certainly not a film you could make today. As a story, it was interesting enough but not groundbreaking. I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around why you would make a film like this about Central Asian tribes and cast most of the main characters as white people (or at least, not Asians). I realize it was a different time, but still.
Although I really enjoy John Wayne in his Westerns, he did not shine in this. His delivery was super wooden, and the old-timey English didn't help. I kept waiting for someone to respond to a question with "yea, verily."
Fine entertainment, but definitely not a keeper. Good thing it was only 25 cents.
2.5 Tartar women out of 5
This movie is the most puzzling thing I’ve ever watched. As a fan of John Wayne, I can confidently this is the worst movie he ever put out. It is so hilariously bad that I can’t help but enjoy it.
With all time great movies like “The Searchers” and “Red River” coming out in previous years, you can’t help but wonder why The Duke would assume the role of Genghis Khan. It seems so far out of his comfort zone, but Wayne attempts to make this atrocious story bearable for the viewers. He gives an effort to make the movie decent (not in a historically accurate way, but in a good ol’ John Wayne “Howdy Pilgrim” type of way, which…
With its climactic scene of John Wayne, in ill-considered makeup and Fu Manchu mustache, standing on a desert hilltop in Technicolor nighttime blue, pleading to the heavens to send him some men, this would likely have been reclaimed as a silly camp classic by now if it weren't for the dark backstory. Famously, the blasted Mongol plains are being portrayed by none other than a fresh nuclear testing ground, which led to an extremely high cancer rate among the cast and crew. Otherwise it feels like John Wayne doing any of his typical western hero characters (and his approach to pronunciation is just as it would be in say, The Searchers), but with a character where he could get away with no moral restraint.
This movie is pretty much known for two things, John Wayne horribly cast playing Ghengis Khan and the fact that it was filmed on a fairly recently used nuclear test site resulting in nearly half the cast and crew dying of Cancer.
Once you get past those really shitty things it’s still not a great movie. It also paints Ghengis Khan is a pretty positive light. Which is fairly insane for a guy who was responsible for up to 40 million people dead. One of my favorite podcasters Dan Carlin made a good point when he compared Ghengis Khan to Adolf Hitler in that we are so far removed from those people that Ghengis was responsible for killing that…
aside from everyone being in yellow-face, and waynes particularly awful performance, this is also unforgivably boring. waste of technicolor.
One more of those films hard hit by critics for not understanding the context in which it is made. It should be understood that it is a 1956 production, a project with not much funding and that really gets the viewer entertained. If you like Asian history in general you will enjoy it, ignore criticism and prejudice and enjoy this classic. It is also worth remembering the genre to which this film belongs, since if we compare it with other works of the genre, we already realize that it has been unfairly crushed by critics. Surely because it tells us about a story located in Central Asia and not a story in the repetitive Wild West? Well yes, surely because of this ...
this is undoubtedly one of the most sexist movies I've ever seen and I can't tell if it's because it's from the 50s or because it's about Genghis Khan or a mixture of both lol
i feel like this movie is trying to gaslight me into forgetting what human interaction sounds like
"She is a woman, Jamuga. Much woman. Should her perfidy be less that that of other women?"
Auteurism so vulgar that it literally poisoned and eventually killed the single greatest movie star who has ever walked the Earth! Howard Hughes and John Wayne are probably chilling right now in Heaven, drinking their hearts out, laughing down at all the miserable farts who cannot relax and enjoy a handsomely mounted, majestically scored, high camp, old school adventure (or just the presence of the red wildcat Susan Hayward). Has an actual Mongolian ever been asked about the "non-troversial" casting choices and if the Duke made their people proud in the role? That will be the day...
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