The earliest tales of traditional Middle Eastern folk tales, commonly subsumed under the umbrella title of One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights are thought to have have come from the Indian Sub-continent and Persia. The collection was built upon in piecemeal fashion in other Islamic lands throughout the Ottoman Empire, then at some point the compiled stories were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla wa-layla (or The Thousand Nights) [‘One Thousand and One Nights’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
The Arabian tales reached Western audiences in book form and ultimately the (English language) cinema courtesy of the work of many western scholars over many years – of which British explorer and orientalist Sir Richard Burton was but one important contributor, not to overlook the work of Henry Torrens the first translator of the 1001 Nights from Arabic to English⊙.
Hollywood first visited the “Arabian Nights” world for subject matter early on during the silent era…including the related fascination with Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik character, but it wasn’t until the 1940s that it became a regular feature of Hollywood cinema✳. By the early 1950s the popularity of the sub-genre had passed its high-water mark and pretty much tapered off after that point. Subsequently Hollywood has shown only sporadic interest in the sub-genre.
‘Sword of Ali Baba’ (1965): Robin Hoodesque Ali
Cinema’s (especially Hollywood’s) harvesting of the “1001 Nights” for script material has been restricted to a handful of the better known stories, predominantly Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin’s Magic Lamp and the frame narrative of the storyteller Shahryar and Scheherazade. In typical eclectic Hollywood style, filmmakers have “cherry-picked”, incorporating several of the Arabian Nights story narratives into the same film…with the character of Ali Baba generally given the predictable “Robin Hood” treatment, depicted as a liberator redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor!
1940 British production values
1940, The Thief of Bagdad: The spark for a steady stream of American “Arabian Nights” films♤
The 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad (made in the UK but distributed internationally by American company United Artists) seemed to be a catalyst for the “Arabian Sands of the Desert” film. Itself a remake the 1924 silent flick with the same title starring Douglas Fairbanks Snr, the 1940 Thief of Bagdad was British made but completed in California because of the disruption of Hitler’s War in Europe. The British Thief of Bagdad had high production values, a big budget and technical innovations…Technicolour and the first significant use of bluescreening in films; elaborate sets and costumes; high calibre acting and top-notch British filmmakers Alexander Korda and Michael Powell.
Low-budget Arabian adventure flicks with a cast of exotics
The box-office and critical success of The Thief of Bagdad provided an impetus to Hollywood studios to try to cash in on its success. Columbia eventually responded with its own Arabian A-picture 1001 Nights (1945) [‘A Thousand and One Nights/1001 Nights’ (1945), www.1000misspenthours.com], but the Forties through to the early Fifties saw a spate of mainly B-flicks on the Arabian Nights theme. In essence these were blatantly escapist romantic/adventures which rehashed Arabian stereotypes through mainstream American eyes (see PostScript). These Middle Eastern adventures provided a new (exotic) setting and new material for studios to feed a public perhaps feeling a bit jaded from a surfeit of Westerns (“cowboys and indians” films). They were also a fresh alternative to the string of World War 2 pictures and historical costume dramas being churned out of Hollywood.
‘Arabian Nights’ (1942)
Universal Pictures in particular took to the sub-genre with gusto, casting exotic types of players to headline these movies, eg, using and re-using the likes of Dominican Republic born Maria Montez, Mysore born Sabu and Vienna born (of Turkish and Czech Jewish origins) Turhen Bey in US Arabian B-pics, starting with Arabian Nights (1942). This three-piece ensemble was always accompanied by the distinctly un-exotic, “All-American hero” Jon Hall! Universal’s approach was usually to alternate their adventure locales – a standard Arabian Nights pic would typically be followed by a “South Seas island adventure” (almost invariably with the same “front four” and with titles such as White Savage and Cobra Woman) – just in case the punters were getting tired of the studio’s fixation on all those dudes in flowing robes and endless sand hills!
‘Sinbad the Sailor’ (1947): D Fairbanks Jnr doing his best “Errol Flynn impersonation” – Sinbad as romantic swashbuckler!
Many of the top male stars in Hollywood had a stab at playing the swarthy Arabian hero role during the sub-genre’s heyday…Ronald Colman in Kismet (1944); Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, following in his illustrious father’s swashbuckling footsteps in RKO’s Sinbad the Sailor (1947); Rock Hudson in The Golden Blade (1953); Jeff Chandler in Flame of Araby (1951); Tony Curtis (teaming up with Piper Laurie always outfitted as a harem girl) in The Prince who was a Thief (1951) and The Son of Ali Baba (1952). On the female lead side, Universal and United Artists gradually moved from using Dominican Montez to Canadian brunette Yvonne De Carlo as its main Arabian princess/heroine in films like The Desert Hawk (1950) and Fort Algiers (1953)◈.
Columbia’s foray into the “Arabian Adventureland” Columbia Pictures maintained a sporadic interest in the sub-genre. It made three adventure features over a 19 year span around the heroic character of Sinbad, each heavily imbued with fantasy elements. In this series comprising The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger(1977), Sinbad, played by three different actors, all have to confront and triumph over all manner of malevolent mythical creatures (dragons, gigantic birds, supernatural monsters, etc) with the odd, nefarious wizard or grand vizier thrown in along the hero’s journey.
“Arabian Nights” meets “Sword-and-Sandals”
By around 1960 sword-and-sandal epic films (sometimes called Peplum) films were in vogue especially in Europe (see article ‘Review of The Epic Film’, March 2015 blog). At the centre of the “Sword-and-Sandal” flick was the invincible strongman-hero who would typically flex his massive muscles and battle Greek, Persian, Egyptian, Assyrian or some other despot from a mythical land. In a merging of Classical and Arabian adventure motifs, studios would occasionally reassign their contracted stars of “Peplums” to “1001 Nights” pics…so in the 1961 Italian made Il Ladro Di Bagdad) bodybuilder Steve Reeves trades his Classical Greek white tunic for some robes, a turban and a scimitar!
X-rated ‘Arabian Nights’, the Pasolini Arabesque
Continental “Arabian Nights”
Enthusiasm for Arabian “desert and minaret” films was by no means restricted to Hollywood film sets and the US, nor did the sub-genre entirely disappear after the 1950s. Among the subsequent efforts there was The Conqueror of the Orient, a 1960 Italian adventure flick shot in the De Laurentiis Studios in Rome; Shéhérazade, a 1963 French production with Anna Karina; Captain Sindbad (1963) an independent production starring Guy William’s (better known as TV’s Zorro) was made in Munich. And of course there was the sexed-up, X-rated Continental version of The Arabian Nights (1974) by the always different, always polemical and confronting Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini – the third in his trilogy of takes on the greats books of the world literary canon (following The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales).
Sub-continent Hindi, Bengali and Tamil “Arabian Nights”
Considering that the South Asian Sub-continent played a formative part as an early contributor to the compilation of Arabian folktales, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that Indian cinema had embraced the Arabian Nights sub-genre. The Wadia brothers made Alibaba Aur 40 Chor in Hindi/Urdu in 1954 (remade in 1966 by Homi Wadia). Additional entries from India include Alibabavum 40 Thirudargalum (‘Alibaba and the Forty Thieves’), a 1956 Tamil-language “fantasy-swashbuckler” and a Bengali version of the Ali Baba story, Ali Baba and his Wonderful Lamp (1957).
Mr Magoo’s ‘1001 Arabian Nights’ animated feature
“1001 Nights”, longevity in animation
The one movie genre where the Arabian Nights movie has achieved real staying power and ongoing popularity has been in animated feature films. There has been numerous attempts at telling the Arabian tales through animation on the big screen. In the US, Columbia led the way with its 1959 1001 Arabian Nights, very loosely based on the Arab folktale of Aladdin, but essentially a vehicle for the popular, myopic TV cartoon character Mr Magoo. The big box-office inroads in Arabian Nights animations were made by those that came later… especially the Disney classic, eg, Aladdin (1992), which spawned successful sequels, Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar (1994) and Aladdin and the King of Thieves (1996). Hanna-Barbera also produced its comic cartoon critters take on “The Book of the 1001 Nights” with Scooby-Doo! in Arabian Nights (1994, made-for-television). Another in the animated category was the Indian/US co-production, Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists (2000).
Aladdin, he of the lamp with remarkable transformative powers, has been well served cinematically in animation features, viz a Soviet (Russian) fantasy version of Volshebnaya lampa Aladdina/Aladdin’s Magic Lamp in 1966; a French version, Aladin et la Lampe Merveilleuse/Aladdin and His Magic Lamp in 1970. There has even been a Japanese manga anime feature on the 1001 Nights theme, Doraemon: Nobita’s Dorarabian Nights (1991).
PostScript: Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Middle Eastern Muslims
❝(Aladdin) from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face. It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.❞
~ opening song from the original theatrical release of Disney’s 1992 Aladdin (due to protests Disney subsequently modified the offending lyrics but kept the ‘barbaric’ reference✤)
The bulk of Hollywood movies like those above have resorted to over-simplified, usually demeaning, representations of Arabs and of the Arab world回. Lebanese-American academic Jack Shaheen pioneered research in this area, unearthing the extent to which Hollywood filmmakers manipulated the images and perpetuated orientalist stereotypes on the screen¤. So, in the typical 1001 Nights movie, we get totally formulaic story-lines which have become an established trope in the trade…the (often eponymous) hero suffers an injustice (imprisonment, exile, etc) at the hands of an evil cabal of usurper sheiks/caliphs (aided and abetted by greedy merchants who covet all the wealth and power for themselves). The princely hero recovers and ultimately overthrow the tyrant/regime, and in the process of course wins the beautiful, entrapped princess!
The Harem Girls’ pool shot in the 1942 film
The films are usually decorated with an obligatory harem of young, gorgeous and seemingly empty-headed girls lounging round doing nothing, occasionally belly-dancing or reclining in a pool (kind of your Arabian equivalent of the bikini girls in the 1960s beach movies). Universal’s Arabian Nights for example is full of sexy, seductive veiled dancers. Not exactly Islamic orthodoxy here! Sightings of the Taj Mahal in the 1942 film also illustrates how Hollywood mangles geography in the Arab World…the same goes for history, many plots involve ahistorical scenarios, eg, in the 2000 Arabian Nights miniseries the 8th century AD narrator recounts stories in which 17th-18th century muskets are in use [Arabian Nights (miniseries), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org; ‘Veils, Harems and Belly Dancers’, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, (Arab American National Museum) www.arabstereotypes.org].The settings for the movies are equally formulaic – bustling bazaars with narrow, crowded alleys full of pickpockets, cardboard palaces that look like flimsy, fake Alhambras. Genies, flying carpets, robotic guards – a scene of frivolous adventure and fantasy. Outside of the city everything is amorphous desert, endless sand hills punctuated by outposts of tents and a caravan of camels❦ [‘Ancient Egypt and Desert Landscapes’, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, (Arab American National Museum) www.arabstereotypes.org].
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⊙ the most popular of the 1001 Nights tales, and the most utilised by movie-makers – the Voyages of Sinbad, Aladdin and his lamp, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves – were not part of the original collection of stories but were added by the French translator Antoine Galland in the 18th century
✳ I would hesitate to describe the “Arabian Nights” movie as a genre in itself, it would be more correct to call it a sub-genre, in the same way that road films and biopics are sub-genre films. Arabian Nights films are sub-genres, usually of the genre of Adventure or Adventure/Fantasy (occasionally Adventure/Comedy) ♤ Americans insist on the spelling ‘Bagdad’, rather than the traditional Anglo/Commonwealth preference for ‘Baghdad’…just as they prefer ‘Sinbad’ rather than ‘Sindbad’, as it is sometimes rendered
◈ movies such as Fort Algiers also cross-over into related-type territory, the North African Bedouin/French Foreign Legion desert film
✤ the Disney animated version makes a further sin of omission common to cinematic portrayals of the character Aladdin – making him a boy of Arab appearance. One of the few screen adaptations to heed the textual evidence which indicates that Aladdin is a Chinese boy is the 2000 Arabian Nights miniseries, casting a Chinese-American in the role
回 Hollywood has shown itself to be notorious at marginalising “the Other” on-screen, note the very strong parallels between its characterisations of Arabs/Muslims and of Native American ‘Indians’ and Mexicans ¤ Shaheen spent decades scrutinising not just the Arabian Nights movies but all Hollywood films and television that dealt with Arabs and Muslims, concluding that Hollywood depicted Arabs in overwhelmingly negative terms – as bandits, as duplicitous, naive, rapacious and malevolent people of a savage, nomadic race (and after 9/11 in particular, as one-dimensional terrorists) [JG Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilified a People (2001)]
❦ Hollywood productions reinforce the European orientalist construct, as identified by Palestinian scholar Edward Said, reducing the Orient to no more than “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences”
Cervantes‘ Don Quixote is without peer as the foremost work in Spanish literature…it is considered without question to be the most influential work in the entire Spanish language literary canon❉. The general consensus among authorities in the field is that it was the primary manifestation (first pub. Vol I 1605) of the novel as we understand the development of that emerging literary form.
DQ & Sancho Panza
The Spanish proudly extol Cervantes’ name in the same reverential tone as the English speaking world bestows on Shakespeare. When it came to adaptations of Don Quixote to the cinema screen however, Cervantes’ great novel has not experienced the same good fortune as screen productions of Shakespeare’s greatest plays have had. While the story of the ageing knight-errant’s folly-filled forays in the campo of La Mancha has been a popular source material for the theatre, opera and both the big and small screen, it has not proved a rewarding experience for some of the leading filmmakers! There have been a number of attempts to bring the book to the cinema that have ended either in disarray or as incomplete projects…the mildly suspicious among us might easily convince themselves that the subject of Don Quixote is jinxed!
Disney: the animated feature’s arrested development
One of the early US attempts to produce a film of Don Quixote was as a feature-length cartoon by Walt Disney. The Disney team laboured for six decades commencing in the 1930s to make an animated version of Don Quixote. Studio artist Ferdinand Horvath produced project sketches of the Spanish knight-errant for Disney as early as 1929. Preparatory work for a film project during WWII using concepts inspired by 17th century artistic titan Diego Velázquez was jettisoned after Disney had two commercial failures in a row with Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940. The studio tried again, several times (1946, 1951, even as recent as the late 1990s). All of the projects were eventually aborted[1]. Don Quixote thus far has evaded all attempts at being ‘Disneyfied’✫.
Orson on the DQ set
Orson’s never-ending project: Less than awesome
Orson Welles’ efforts to make a film of Don Quixote was an incredibly drawn-out saga that failed to bear fruit. Financing (habitually a millstone around Welles’ cervix) was partly to blame but procrastination by the former “boy wonder” director was taken to a new level. Starting off with test footage as early as 1955, Welles was still intermittently working on the unfinished picture (which he described as his “own personal project”) when he died (1985). By which time Welles had 300,000 feet of shot film in the can! Eventually a version completed by a Spanish director saw the light of screen in the 1990s (described as a “Spanish restoration”). However according to James Clarke, the “print (was) impoverished…the film lacked clarity… (and) Welles’ commentary and dialogue was ineffectively dubbed into Spanish”[2].
The jinx again!
Dynamic Hollywood producer of the 1950s, Mike Todd, was riding high on the back of the blockbuster success of the star-studded Around the World in 80 Days. Todd chose “Don Quixote” as the follow-up project to ’80 Days’ based on the Jules Verne novel. Having cast his new, glamour wife Elizabeth Taylor to star in a lavish production of the Cervantes classic, the hard-headed Todd’s plans for “Don Quixote” perished in the airplane crash that took the producer’s life in 1958.
The doco on DQ the disaster movie!
Terry Gilliam, nearly 20 years worth of broken mirrors!
The award for the most ill-fated attempt to bring “Don Quixote” to the screen goes to Monty Python member and film director Terry Gilliam. Gilliam first conceptualised his project in 1991…pre-production got underway seven years later and production itself got rolling in 2000 in Navarre (Spain). Gilliam brought his own, very idiosyncratic take on the Man of La Mancha (very loosely based on the original story). He cast Johnny Depp as a 21st century time-traveller hurled back to engage with the perpetually confused 16th century “windmill-tilter”.
From the start obstacles and setbacks piled on top of each other – flash floods destroyed sets and equipment in the Spanish campo, as a result the filmmakers had problems securing insurance for the production; Jean Rochefort as Quixote took ill and had to leave the set and the movie altogether; it was discovered that one of the film sites was directly below a Spanish Air Force flight path; plus the production was hit with further financial problems – the net outcome was the cessation and cancellation of the production. Gilliam made several subsequent attempts to relaunch the movie, in all there were eight unsuccessful tilts at making “Don Quixote” over a period of 18-19 years with a succession of actors coming and going. In 2002 Gilliam, no doubt with cathartic intent, released a documentary Lost in La Mancha about the trials and tribulations of trying to realise the plagued ‘Quixote’ feature film[3].
Michael Palin was one of many actors lost in transit in the course of making Gilliam’s film!
The indefatigable American Python resurrected the project once more earlier this year with longtime collaborator Jonathan Pryce in the title role. Finally in June of this year Gilliam tweeted, rather sheepishly, that the filming was finally completed…The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is slated for release in 2018[4].
PostScript: ‘Don Quixote’, a mixed track record in the cinema
Notwithstanding the long trail of misfortunes and misadventures that has bedevilled the efforts of the above film-makers to make Don Quixote, it would be misleading to conclude that the subject has been universally cursed. A survey of Don Quixote’s cinematic history on the screen confirms that it has been far from unmakeable. First point to note is that there have been a considerable number of ‘DQ’ films churned out over the decades[5], many of which went through more or less without mishap, or at least with nothing like the obstacles and hurdles in the way of Gilliam and Welles and others.
From across the world of international cinema these productions include the 1957 Russian version filmed in the Crimea (Dir: Grigori Kozintsev); the 1972 Man of La Mancha (a musical/comedy with Peter O’Toole in the lead); a 2000 feature with John Lithgow as the chivalrous but hopelessly misguided hidalgo (country gentleman); Albert Serra’s modernised Spanish version, Honour of the Knights (2006); a 2015 version directed by James Franco’s USC students, Don Quixote: The Ingenuous Gentleman of La Mancha; and believe it or not, a 2007 Spanish/Italian computer animation comedy Donkey Xote (hee-haw!), a light-hearted retelling of the classic story from the perspective of his squire Sancho Panza’s Equus Africanus steed.
___________________________________________________________________ ❉ its literary influence goes far beyond the Hispanic world…extending to his English contemporary Shakespeare who is widely thought to have collaborated with John Fletcher on a play (now lost), Cardenio, believed to be based on an episode in the Cervantes novel ✫ Disney still haven’t entirely let it go…the phenomenal box office triumph of the Pirates of the Caribbean series has prompted Disney to engage ‘gun’ screenwriter Billy Ray to write something similar in tone for Don Quixote, ‘Disney Developing a Don Quixote Movie’, (J Kroll) Variety, 13-Oct-2016, www.variety.com
[1] James Clarke, ‘The troubled history of Don Quixote on film’, BFI: Film Forever, 26-Apr-2016, www.bfi.org.uk
[2] ibid. ; ”Don Quixote (unfinished film), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[3] ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘My latest is a disaster movie’, The Guardian, 04-Feb-2001, www.theguardian.com
[4] “Sorry for the long silence…” (@TerryGilliam, tweeted 04-Jun-2017)
[5] in fact the tale of the muddled hidalgo with a penchant for charging at windmills has been a movie subject just about from the first dawn of the moving picture – as early as 1903 a silent film of Don Quixote was made by the French, ‘Don Quixote de La Mancha: DQ and Film’, (Barbara Robinson), USC Libraries (Research Guides), www.libguides.usc.edu
Over recent months Sydney “Pub Tsar” Justin Hemmes’ Merivale Group acquired the Collaroy Hotel on Pittwater Road for a reported $21 million⋇. The hotel (currently closed for renovation) is situated in one of the Northern Beaches’ finest old and best preserved buildings, the Arlington Amusement Hall✦. A hotel since the late 1990s the Arlington’s premises has traded under various names including ‘The Collaroy’ and the ‘Surf Rock Hotel’. Earlier than this the building had housed the Northern Beaches’ first wine bar called ‘1066’. The building also contains the separate Collaroy Beach Club.
(Photo: Northern Beaches Council)
The iconic building with its asymmetrical Federation brick facade has a commercial life story dating back to the First World War. It was built by Herbert Williamson for his wife Christina somewhere between 1915 and 1919. It was officially opened as the Arlington Amusement Hall in 1921 although it had already been used a cinema showing silent feature movies from 1919.
The Collaroy in 2017
At the time of the Arlington’s public opening the local newspaper described it thus: “The hall is situated right on the beach and attached to it are four shops … The hall is commodious, and is approached by a fine vestibule, a stage and dressing rooms and also a gallery add to the comfort of both entertainers and patrons …” Originally the building contained a row of (four) retail shops with attached 1st floor residences. We know that the business enterprises of three of these shops comprised a draper, a chemist and a stationer.
Collaroy, a beachhead prone to sand erosion
Arlington Amusement Hall’s location, built right on to the beachfront has made it and other buildings around it on that side of Pittwater Road susceptible to storm damage. In 1944 huge storms lashing the beach washed away some three metres of the Hall’s foundations. Fortunately the large building was spared the worst of the2016 onslaught when many nearby properties had their frontages, fences and walls uprooted in the massive winter storms…not so fortunate was the Collaroy Beach Club premises affixed to the Arlington Hall/Hotel which lost a balcony in the violent onslaught of savage nature.
The Arlington in the 1920s
PostScript: Collaroy’s other building relic
It is interesting that Arlington Hall started its life as a picture theatre because today when people associate Collaroy with cinema, they think of another old historic building on the opposite side of Pittwater Road – the still operating, independent Collaroy Cinema (trading as ‘United-Cinemas” in conjunction with Avalon and Warriewood cinemas further up the peninsula). Collaroy Cinema, an Art Deco building from the 1930s, with its garish and (to some tastes) sickly blue-painted exterior, stands out from the modern beach shopfronts around it. The Art Deco building retains its elegant design, but its tired, slightly battered appearance representing nearly 80 years of lived-in experience is in stark contrast with the “tender loving care” bestowed on The Arlington. Collaroy Cinema remains one of the relatively few surviving and operating picture houses of its kind in New South Wales.
‘Indy’ picture house in Pittwater Road
Nomenclature: the name of both the suburb and the beach derives from the paddle steamer SS Collaroy which was stranded off the beach for three years in the 19th century (1881-84).
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⋇ coming on top of Merivale’s 2016 acquisition of another Northern Beaches’ landmark, the even more historic Newport Arms (rebranded by Hemmes as ‘The Newport’)
✦ Amusement Hall seems to be a bit of a misnomer…rather than being a place where you’d expect to find penny arcade machines and games of fun and luck (the domain of English style seaside piers), these amusement halls, also common in the US in the same era, could simply be large buildings which functioned as multi-purpose community halls
References:
John Morcombe, ‘Arlington Amusement Hall a Collaroy icon for almost a century’, Manly Daily, 31-Oct-2014
‘Collaroy/Narrabeen, Voices from the Past’, Australian Heritage Festival, 01-May-2017, www.nationaltrust.org.au
‘The Collaroy hotel’, Architects Nicholas + Associates, http://anplusa.com/projects/the-collaroy-hotel/
‘Art Deco Cinemas, Picture Palaces and Movie Theaters’, www.decolish.com
The Conqueror (1956) was a doomed film, both cinematically and in terms of its devastating human cost. Its reception critically was abysmal and its performance at the box office was less than mediocre. Reviews for the movie disaster have been consistent in assigning it an unenviable position as one of cinema’s worst ever pictures, one of Hollywood’s greatest “turkeys”¹.
Yahoo!Movies described The Conqueror as “the most toxic movie ever made”…tarnishing the careers of those who appeared in this egregious stinker, especially its star John Wayne, effectively bankrupting RKO Pictures (costing a blown-out $6 million) and contributing to the deaths of an inordinate number of its cast and crew².
John Wayne, faced with the need to fulfil the third and final picture of his contract with RKO, apparently fished the discarded script out of the rubbish bin and convinced the assigned director Dick Powell (who in turn convinced RKO’s owner Howard Hughes) to make the film with Wayne playing the role as Mongol warlord Genghis Khan (a role intended apparently for Marlon Brando). By all accounts Wayne was grossly miscast⋇, interpreting the great Mongol leader as a cowboy (probably an entirely natural notion for the Duke!). The script (by Oscar Millard) was terrible and vacuous as the following inane, awkward samples of the dialogue illustrate:
Temujin: I feel this Tartar wo-man 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 wo-man.
૱…………૱…………૱
Temujin: She is wo-man, Jamuga…MUCH wo-man!
૱…………૱…………૱
Snow Canyon, radioactive movie set
The Conqueror was a patently absurd vehicle by any standard – as an attempt at film art or as a plausible historical reconstruction…but as disastrous as the movie was, it was to have far more serious and far-reaching tragic consequences. Most of the filming took place at Snow Canyon¤ near Saint George in Utah, 130 odd miles from a nuclear test site where the US Government detonated 11 above-ground nuclear explosions in 1953. By the time location filming took place, June-August 1954, winds had shifted the still highly radioactive soil downwind to Snow Canyon. The shooting of the action sequences (in an adventure movie this was most of the film!) necessitated that the performers wallowed in the carcinogenic dust day after day.
The film’s producers (Hughes and Powell) were aware of the proximity of the atomic testing before shooting started but had been assured by the government that the atomic tests posed no risks to public health, a gross deception (self-deception?). Compounding the dilemma, at the end of the location work Hughes ordered that 60 tons of the radioactive reddy-brown dirt from the Snow Canyon site in Utah be carted back to the RKO film set at Culver City for re-takes!
Human Fallout
Consequently, by about 1980 it could be shown that 91 of the 220 individuals who made up the film’s location staff had contracted cancer including its stars Wayne, Susan Haywood, Agnes Moorehead and Pedro Armendáriz (one of Wayne’s sons who had a small part in the movie later also died of cancer). There is no definitive way of proving that the contaminated soil was 100% to blame for the cancer deaths…Wayne had a heavy smoking habit (up to seven packs a day!), as did others in the cast, which could have been a contributing factor to the malignancies⍔. The harmful effects of the area’s radiation however is undeniably part of the explanation for such an aberrant outbreak of disease. Robert Pendleton, professor of biology at the University of Utah, concluded that the toxic fallout of Saint George was of epidemic proportions, that the toll was about three times what might be expected³. In addition it is well documented that health checks on ordinary residents of Saint George similarly revealed higher incidences of cancer than other comparable areas⁴.
PostScript: Howard Hughes’ own private purgatory
As is well-known, The Conqueror’s Producer Hughes lived as a recluse, (literally) hermetically sealed off from the rest of humanity, for his last years. It is believed that he deeply regretted his decision to go ahead with The Conqueror project. Hughes delayed the film’s theatrical release and attempted to purchase every single print to try to keep it out of the public eye. Part of his penance in his hermit mode of existence, it has been claimed, was to watch and re-watch the disastrous movie every day (along with Ice Station Zebra⁵).
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⋇ Wayne as a 13th century Asiatic warrior was a ludicrous choice, as the casting was overall – only two of the entire performers were of Asian descent. Many of the doomed extras were undisguised Navajo Indians
¤ Howard Hughes thought the rolling red hills would be similar in appearance to the steppes of Mongolia
⍔ although ‘Duke’ Wayne did not die from his lung cancer (which went into remission) but from the subsequent stomach cancer he contracted [Gaggiano, below]
¹ included in H & M Medved & R Dreyfuss’ 1978 The Fifty Worst Films of All Time
² ‘The Conqueror: The story of the most toxic movie in Hollywood history’, (Yahoo!Movies, 09-Nov-2016), www.uk.movies.yahoo.com
³ Pendleton: “…in a group this size you’d expect only 30-some cancers to develop. With 91, I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up even in a court of law” – Karen G Jackovich & Mark Sennet, ‘The Children of John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Dick Powell Fear That Fallout Killed Their Parents’, People, originally posted 10-Nov-1980, www.people.com
⁴ Rory Carroll, ‘Hollywood and the downwinders still grapple with nuclear fallout’, The Guardian,, 06-Jun-2015, www.guardian.com
⁵ Greg Caggiano, ‘The Conqueror (1956): The Film That Killed John Wayne … Literally’, Reel to Real, 26-Jul-2010, https://gcaggiano.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/the-conqueror-1956-the-film-that-killed-john-wayne-literally/
1001 Nights archetype city
‘Sword of Ali Baba’ (1965): Robin Hoodesque Ali
1940 British production values
‘Arabian Nights’ (1942)
‘Sinbad the Sailor’ (1947): D Fairbanks Jnr doing his best “Errol Flynn impersonation” – Sinbad as romantic swashbuckler!
X-rated ‘Arabian Nights’, the Pasolini Arabesque 
Mr Magoo’s ‘1001 Arabian Nights’ animated feature
Aladdin, he of the lamp with remarkable transformative powers, has been well served cinematically in animation features, viz a Soviet (Russian) fantasy version of Volshebnaya lampa Aladdina/Aladdin’s Magic Lamp in 1966; a French version, Aladin et la Lampe Merveilleuse/Aladdin and His Magic Lamp in 1970. There has even been a Japanese manga anime feature on the 1001 Nights theme, Doraemon: Nobita’s Dorarabian Nights (1991).The Harem Girls’ pool shot in the 1942 film
(Photo: Northern Beaches Council)
Yahoo!Movies described The Conqueror as “the most toxic movie ever made”…tarnishing the careers of those who appeared in this egregious stinker, especially its star John Wayne, effectively bankrupting RKO Pictures (costing a blown-out $6 million) and contributing to the deaths of an inordinate number of its cast and crew².
John Wayne, faced with the need to fulfil the third and final picture of his contract with RKO, apparently fished the discarded script out of the rubbish bin and convinced the assigned director Dick Powell (who in turn convinced RKO’s owner Howard Hughes) to make the film with Wayne playing the role as Mongol warlord Genghis Khan (a role intended apparently for Marlon Brando). By all accounts Wayne was grossly miscast⋇, interpreting the great Mongol leader as a cowboy (probably an entirely natural notion for the Duke!). The script (by Oscar Millard) was terrible and vacuous as the following inane, awkward samples of the dialogue illustrate:
Snow Canyon, radioactive movie set
