John Wayne's Death And The 1954 Movie 'the Conqueror'

By Author: Kenneth J. McCormick
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John Wayne's Death and the 1954 movie 'The Conqueror'
By Kenneth J. McCormick
Http://aboutfacts.net


On the morning of January 27, 1951, a large flash alarmed ranchers as far away as Utah, a tremendous sound like thunder followed breaking windows as far away as Arizona. In the aftermath a pink cloud formed, a cloud alive with debris carrying radioactive energy, energy that would subtly drift across military lines, geographic markers, and eventually thousands of homes. Casually the cloud made its way east until, captured by gravity and rain, it returned to earth in the form of fallout. The total amount of radiation released from fallout from the Nevada Test Site is not known. The number of medical problems that have arisen from the tests is also a mystery.


The last film personally produced by Howard Hughes, The Conqueror, starred John Wayne as Genghis Kahn in a strange, oriental western that regularly makes the worst film lists.


Directed by Dick Powell, it co-stared Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead.Iit was an expensive production with elaborate sets.


...
... o find locations for the Gobi Desert sequences, Powell and his assistants scoured eight states before finding the 'perfect location' near St. George in Utah. A nearby American Indian reservation provided numerous extras to act as the Mongolian hordes. However, St. George was just 137 miles from the Nevada test site, where there had been 11 atmospheric nuclear tests the year before. Most of the filming took place in Snow Canyon, which turned out to be a radioactive 'hot spot'. After filming there from June to August 1954, cast and crew returned to the studio, accompanied by 60 tons of sand from the area, to enable retakes to be completed in the studio.


Between then and 1984, 91 of the cast and crew of 220 developed various carcinomas and over half of them, including Wayne, Powell, Hayward and Moorehead had died. Another of the movie's stars, Pedro Armandirez, committed suicide in 1963, at the age of 51, when he developed terminal cancer of the lymphatic system. He had survived cancer of the kidney in 1958.


DR Robert C. Pendleton, Professor of Biology at the University of Utah, comments: "With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you'd expect only 30 some cancers to develop...I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up in a court of law."


The children of John Wayne and Susan Hayward accompanied their parents on location. Michael Wayne developed skin cancer in 1975; his brother Patrick had a benign breast tumor removed in 1969.


According to people magazine (10.11.80), at least one top Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) scientist is racked by doubt over the incident. "Please, God," he said, "don't let us have killed John Wayne."


The town of St. George, Utah suffered a similar fate. Uninformed of the fallout danger, and exposed in their homes for years instead of months, the residents of St. George eventually contracted cancers in staggering numbers.


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Ken is the webmaster of About Facts Net which is an interesting free internet magazine site. Many of the articles on the site are accompanied by photos, video and/or audio. The site is suitable for the entire family.

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