Besides, no Hollywood or International leading man would want to sully his carefully nurtured reputation playing the real Genghis Khan........they wouldn't want to walk down the red carpet explaining scenes where they slaughter millions of people.....way bad for the image....
So you expect a Hollywood-ized, candy-coated Khan......fair and balanced like...uh...Fox News, tough with his foes and a hot blooded romancer of his royal squeeze, Bortei. No bloodthirsty butcher of innocents.......maybe just misunderstood as he tries to Make The Mongols Great Again.....
You can see this approach in both Howard Hughes's famously cursed "The Conqueror" and nine years later in "Genghis Khan", a typical International co-production traffic jam from the same folks who gave us "The Long Ships" (covered in yesterday's post...)
A quick guideline comparison:
The Wrath of Khans..... "Genghis Khan" has Omar Sharif, coasting along off of his breakout role in "Lawrence Of Arabia". While not physically imposing, Omar smolders a whole lot.....this talent for giving good smolder will work for him further in "Doctor Zhivago" But nothing Omar does comes close to comparing with "The Conqueror"s Khan.......a hallucinatory, Ripley's Believe Or Not portrayal by John Wayne. Yes, it's the Duke with pinned-back Asian-ized eyes.....reciting impossibly convoluted faux-historical dialogue like Donald Trump struggling with a Teleprompter.....("Dance for me, Tartar woman.....you're beautiful in your wrath...")
Mrs. Khan..... As Bortei, Genghis's gal-pal, you can choose between the brunette, eternally pale Francois Dorleac in "Genghis" or "The Conqueror"s fiery redhead Susan Hayward.......how either of these seriously white babes end up in the middle of the Mongol hordes is anyone's guess and neither film offers an explanation...
The Bad Guys....."Genghis Khan" easily wins this one with Stephen Boyd's sneering and cackling Lord Jamuga, making his 'Ben Hur' villain look like Mister Rogers. "The Conqueror" merely offers old Western character guy Ted de Corsia in the same ghastly Mongol makeover as Wayne. Wayne's takedown of him is perfunctory, while Sharif and Boyd's final lengthy showdown make a fitting brutal finale to "Genghis Khan"....
Deeply Embarrassing.....Deeply Incorrect....That would apply to pretty much the entire Caucasian cast playing Mongols in "The Conqueror"......a mortified John Wayne bore the shame of it for the rest of his career. But Wayne's humiliation is easily dwarfed in cringe-inducement by Robert Morley and James Mason playing, respectively, the Chinese Emperor and his wily adviser Kam Ling in "Genghis Khan". Morley carries on like a Gilbert & Sullivan 'Mikado' refugee minus the songs..... Mason squints his eyes shut, bares his teeth and mumbles like Confucius freshly unearthed from the grave....
The Battles.....We declare a tie here.....honestly couldn't tell the difference. Hundreds of stunt guys yanked off hundreds of horses.....(and both films featuring the cruel and thankfully long outlawed technique of using tripwires to make the horses fall head first into the ground....)
The Music Tough one to call....."Genghis Khan", like "The Long Ships" boasts a memorable richly robust score by Dusan Radic, this one punctuated with whooping French horns. "The Conqueror"s accompanied by equally busy, fast moving symphonic rabble rousing by Victor Young. We'll give the edge to Radic......you simply can't get his themes out of your head....
Don't Yoke Around.....Both films have a strange fascination with slapping a heavy wooden yoke on our hero. Sharif's Genghis starts off wearing what looks like a cross section of a giant Redwood around his neck. When unlocked, this comes in handy for bashing people in the face with it. Wayne's Genghis gets his arms stretched out across an old fashioned horizontal chunk of wood....convenient for swinging across the heads of unsuspecting sentries.....
One last comparison.....and "The Conqueror" notoriously wins this one hands down...
Scenery That Kills Off The Cast Yugoslavia didn't do much harm to the actors of "Genghis Khan", except maybe to their reputations for being in the movie at all. "The Conqueror", however, filmed in Utah, downwind of an atomic bomb testing site in Nevada.......so Wayne, Hayward and everyone else inhaled a good whiff of dust contaminated with fallout.. (Producer Hughes made things worse by shipping 60 tons of the radioactive sand back to Hollywood for use in the film's soundstage scenes.) Film buffs know the rest...as much of the cast and crew succumbed to varied cancers over the years.
We can't make any claims for artistic integrity in either of these Khan-O-Ramas, but each in their own way supplied a unique array of guilty pleasures. And for that, we'll generously allow them each 2 & 1/2 stars. (** 1/2) Sometimes, to quote John Wayne's Genghis.....they were beautiful in their wrath......
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