John Wayne’s 1956 epic flop ‘gave almost 100 people cancer’ including Duke himself | Films | Entertainment
Like most movie stars, John Wayne had some huge hits but also big turkeys over his Hollywood career.The Conqueror, in which Duke played Genghis Khan after Marlon Brando backed out, may have made a profit at the box office but is now ranked as one of the worst films ever made.Duke is widely believed to have been terribly miscast, even at the time, with The New Times calling the 1956 epic “an Oriental Western” with a script featuring “few unintentional laughs.”Yet what’s even worse is what happened after the production, which created huge controversy and a question over who was to blame.The Howard Hughes-produced movie was partly shot in Utah while the US government were conducting atmospheric nuclear testing one state over. In 1953 alone, 11 above-ground nuclear weapons tests had taken p...