It was good of John Wayne to never stray away from playing John Wayne. This makes “The Conqueror” one of those “Plan 9 From Outer Space” sort of experiences, although with better set design, makeup and budget.
Playing Temujin aka Genghis Khan, John Wayne’s one slip into character was in the eye makeup, an attempt to make him look Asian. Instead, he simply looks drunk. Which he may have been since Bortai, the wife to Temujin, looks about as Mongolian as Anne Baxter’s Egyptian princess Neferteri in “The Ten Commandments”.
Wayne’s portrayal of the great Khan is no different from his other cowboy characters with that slow western twang, which is so very non-method acting. This very fact makes the film watchable, especially if you are not a John Wayne fan. He is so ridiculously awful, and the film is so steeped in whitewash that it is perversely enjoyable.
The best parts are the scenes where men on horses rampage the countryside. There is no getting away from the fact that the dry sun baked landscape of tumbleweeds and rough terrain, so traditional to cowboy movies, make the teeming masses of Mongolian conquerors look as if they rode straight across to the wrong continent.
However, it would have been better if the film simply were not made. Shot in Utah, not too far away from the government’s nuclear testing site, “The Conqueror” exposed both cast members and crew to an unhealthy overdose of radiation. Over the span of twenty years, they would form an unfortunate cancer cluster.
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