When Marlon Brando turned down John Wayne’s problematic movie and avoided death
Many of the biggest stars in Hollywood are often in the running for the same roles, but only one of them is going to end up playing it at the end of the day. The screenplay may have initially been written with Marlon Brando in mind, but he ended up dodging a bullet by not signing on for the film, which could well have contributed to the death of John Wayne.
Having exploded onto the scene and completely changed the face of acting forever in the 1950s, Brando was one of the hottest and most in-demand talents in the business from the second A Streetcar Named Desire was released. Being so naturally gifted placed him in the rare position of being able to carefully pick and choose his parts very early on in his career, leading ‘The Duke’ to end up with the worst end of the deal by far.
The iconic face of the Western lobbied hard to be cast as title character Genghis Khan in The Conqueror, despite the fact he was hardly the first person that comes to mind when envisioning a Mongolian warlord. Funnily enough, audiences completely agreed, with director Dick Powell’s historical epic being savaged by critics and shunned by crowds to not only die a slow and agonising death at the box office, but gain a reputation for being one of the worst films ever made.
The racist caricatures didn’t go down well at the time, and they sure don’t play at all through a modern lens, but that was hardly the lasting reputation of the ill-advised undertaking. Instead, The Conqueror gained an entirely new level of infamy after it was discovered that not only did it shoot on location in nuclear testing areas, but an alarming number of the cast and crew would go on to develop cancer in the years to come.
An investigation determined that 41% of the 220 crew members who worked on the film were diagnosed with cancer, and 21% of that number would succumb to the disease. ‘The Duke’ was among that number on the performative side of the equation, and while he defeated his cancer once after having his left lung and two ribs removed in 1964, he’d be diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1979 and passed away just months later.
Dr Robert C. Pendleton, the director of radiological health at the University of Utah, offered a frank assessment to People after the high volume of cancer cases stemming from The Conqueror was revealed. “In a group this size you’d expect only 30-some cancers to develop,” he said. “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.”
Wayne’s children visited him on the set, and they suffered issues of their own, with Michael developing skin cancer and Patrick being operated on for a benign tumour. There’s no conclusive evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that The Conqueror definitely killed ‘The Duke’ or any of the other people involved, but the statistics make for a damning indictment either way.