Monday, November 14, 2011

Oddities

Silver Screen is showing The Conquerer, a movie starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan that is so bad it's actually funny.
Got to reading the imdb reviews, including this one that refers to the shooting location being swamped with radioactive fallout.
People magazine, believe it or not, did an interesting story about it:

Of The Conqueror's 220 cast and crew members from Hollywood, an astonishing 91 have contracted cancer...No bombs were tested during the actual filming of The Conqueror, but 11 explosions occurred the year before. Two of them were particularly "dirty," depositing long-lasting radiation over the area. The 51.5-kiloton shot code-named "Simon" was fired on April 25, 1953, and the 32.4-kiloton blast "Harry" went off May 19. (In contrast, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 13 kilotons.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

He really pulls off the Mongolian accent. Really stretches his acting chops here.

Art Vandelay said...

"Could it be that this woman has touched your wits as well."

That's when I started to realize this was an unintentional comedy.

Johnny LaRüde said...

And it glows in the dark, too.