Being a History of the Mongol Peoples and Their Most Famous Historical Figures as Portrayed by White People in Fake Eyelids

THE CONQUEROR -- 1956, United States. Starring John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz, Agnes Moorehead, Thomas Gomez, John Hoyt, William Conrad, Ted de Corsia, Leslie Bradley, Lee Van Cleef, Peter Mamakos. Directed by Dick Powell. Written by Oscar Millard. Purchase from Amazon.com.

THE MONGOLS -- 1961, Italy/France. Starring Jack Palance, Anita Ekberg, Franco Silva, Antonella Lualdi, Gabriele Antonini, Pierre Cressoy, Andrej Gardenin, Gianni Garko, Roldano Lupi. Directed by Andre De Toth, Leopoldo Savona, Riccardo Freda. Written by Ottavio Alessi, Alessandro Ferrau, Ernesto Gastaldi, Ugo Guerra, Luciano Martino.

HERCULES VERSUS THE MONGOLS -- 1963, Italy. Starring Mark Forest, Maria Grazia Spina, Ken Clark, Jose Greci, Howard Ross, Tullio Altamura, Nadir Moretti, Fedele Gentile, Loris Loddi, Giuseppe Addobbati, Bianca Doria, Renato Terra, Bruno Scipioni. Directed by Domenico Paolella. Written by Alessandro Ferrau, Luciano Martino, and Domenico Paolella. Purchase from Amazon.com.

HERCULES VERSUS THE BARBARIANS -- 1964, Italy. Starring Mark Forest, Jose Greci, Ken Clark, Gloria Milland, Howard Ross, Roldano Lupi, Mirko Ellis, Tullio Altamura, Renato Terra, Elisabetta Wu, Daniela Igliozzi, Bruno Scipioni. Directed by Domenico Paolella. Written by Alessandro Ferrau, Luciano Martino, and Domenico Paolella.

SAMSON AND THE SEVEN MIRACLES OF THE WORLD -- 1961, Italy. Starring Gordon Scott, Yoko Tani, Helene Chanel, Dante DiPaolo, Gabriele Antonini, Leonardo Severini, Valery Inkijinoff. Directed by Riccardo Freda. Written by Oreste Biancoli and Duccio Tessari. Purchase from Amazon.com.

Genghis Khan is certainly one of the great figures in the history of the world. When you say "Mongolia," he's the first person of whom you're likely to think. He conquered China, swept westward, and eventually had a chain of shopping mall formal wear rental stores named after him. Were it not for Genghis Khan's contributions to society, I would have been at a loss as to wear to rent my tux for the prom back in 1990. But aside from all that, he was one of the world's great conquerors, and whether he was a hero or a villain depends largely on whether or not he conquered in your name or just plain conquered you. Certainly as with all history's epic conquerors -- Ramses, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Vlad Tepes, and Bono from U2 -- Genghis Khan is a person who lends himself to having a sweeping, vast, and complex movie made about his life and influence. And like most of the conquerors throughout history, he's still waiting for that movie to be made.

Not that there haven't been movies made about him. It's just that...well, let me put it this way. When you think, "leader of the Mongol hordes?" who's the first actor that comes to mind? Because if it isn't John Wayne, then you're not thinking like Howard Hughes, and since he's the one who made the Genghis Khan movie, that's who he cast.

John Wayne? Really, it doesn't seem quite so silly after you've seen Susan Hayward cast as a pale-skinned, red-haired Tartar princess. And since the casting director himself was obviously aware of how ludicrous this was, they even throw in a line to the effect of, "I know. A red-haired Tartar princess? Can you believe it?" Well, no, not really. But honestly, if casting Caucasians -- especially extremely famous and recognizable Caucasians like Wayne and Hayward -- is a film's most grievous misstep, then I can forgive it. There are plenty of "fake Asian" movies I enjoy despite the loopy casting. Peter Lorre as the mysterious Mr. Moto, Boris Karloff as Mr. Wong, and Warner Oland as Charlie Chan -- despite the fact that these were all Caucasian leads in Asian roles, the movies were still often quite enjoyable, and the overall racial tone was generally Asian-positive, if delivered in something of a misguided way. At least they were the heroes. Charlie Chan spent almost his entire run of movies being goofily lovable and exposing insidious whities as the evil masterminds behind the various nefarious plots he foiled.

So I can forgive the fake eyelids and bad accents and "honorable grandparents say..." dialogue as long as the movie is enjoyable. Heck, I can even forgive those ridiculous Fu Manchu movies since, although he is the classic "inscrutable Oriental" villain, the movies are simply so utterly absurd that I can't see much point in getting all in a huff about them, especially now. I mean, how many people walk around after seeing a Fu Manchu film (how many people have even seen a Fu Manchu film?) and quake at the thought of ghoulish eight-foot-tall Chinese dudes who still dress like it's the Ming Dynasty stalking about with death rays and chambers of horrors and looking an awful lot like Christopher Lee with fake novelty store buckteeth?

So no, although the famously awkward casting of John Wayne as the legendary Mongolian warlord is the most obvious foible The Conqueror makes (and let's not forget his Mongolian henchman, Lee Van Cleef, or William "Jake and the Fat man" Conrad), there is so much hilariously bad stuff about this disaster of an epic that you'll hardly even notice that the leads aren't Asian. From the promise of epic battles that never materialize to the wretched dialogue to the delivery of said dialogue, The Conqueror really takes every level of filmmaking to a level of badness that quite possibly attains the sublime.

We first meet Genghis Khan when is but the lowly Temujin, looking to cause trouble with a fragile peace between warring Mongolian tribes by kidnapping the princess Bortai (Hayward). The film is on thin ice the moment Wayne starts spitting out the ridiculously stilted (even for an epic from the 1950s) dialogue in his classic John Wayne acting style. His Duke Manchu performance here demands to be placed on a pedestal right alongside William Shatner, Adam West, or Jack Palance at their most histrionic (Palance himself played a Mongol warlord in The Mongols, but we'll get to that some other day). Wayne was never what you would call a great actor, but like many men who weren't great at their chosen craft, he found a highly stylized way of delivering lines that worked remarkably well in certain settings and circumstances. Watch Wayne in a movie like The Searcher or True Grit or a host of other films, and you'll see that with the right material, his style can be very effective.

Saddled with ham-fisted dialogue that sounds like a teenager trying to write in the style of a bloated 1950s epic, however, and Wayne seems like just about the worst thing to ever happen to movies. "I feel this Tartar woman...is for me...and my blood says...take her. There are...moments for wisdom...and moments...when I listen to...my blood; my blood says...take...this Tartar woman!" Wayne stammers in one of the ripest lines. I've seen plenty of bad acting and bad casting, but this one, folks...this one really blows me away. Of course, the worse he gets, the worse the dialogue gets, the more enjoyable the movie becomes.

Wayne himself apparently loved the script, and producer Howard Hughes could imagine no one else in the world who would be better suited to inhabit the furry hat and armor of the Mongolian conqueror. "The Conqueror is a Western in some ways," John Wayne unsuccessfully argued. "The way the screenplay reads, it is a cowboy picture and that is how I am going to play Genghis Khan. I see him as a gunfighter." Which is why Wayne plays the Mongolian with his usual bowlegged swagger and Western movie drawl. I suppose, in reflection, things could have been a lot worse. It could have been an epic movie about ancient Troy or Alexander the Great where a bunch of American actors inexplicably fake British accents. Listening to Brad Pitt "British-up" his Greek character Achilles in Troy makes me miss the days when John Wayne played Genghis with all the sauntering "Well, hey, pilgrim" nonchalance for which he was known.

Which is good, because besides John Wayne's shockingly wretched (he manages to be wooden and hammy at the same time, which is a state few actors can attain) reading of his lines, The Conqueror disappoints on all other levels. As one of the very first films made in CinemaScope -- that's widescreen, to you and me -- one expects it to be a lavish, opulent blowout on the grand scale of other CinemaScope pioneers like The Robe and The Egyptian. This was the dawn of the era of massive Hollywood epics, the grandeur and excess of which have to this day never been rivaled even in this age of CGI. These movies were huge. Everything about them seems to dwarf the common member of the audience, from the sets to the acting to the costumes. These movies were self-indulgent and bloated, but you can't deny that you pretty much see every single penny on the screen. This all came about as a result of the rise of television. Movies had to give audiences something they couldn't get on TV, and that meant exotic, TechniColor, CinemaScope blow-outs. the Conqueror is supposed to be one of these, but held up against contemporaries like the aforementioned The Robe, this tale of the young Khan's rise to power plays like a cut-rate wannabe that lacks even the cheap exotic opulence of some of the lesser peplum films of the 1960s.

The blame for this seems to fall almost squarely on the shoulders of actor-turned director Dick Powell, who fails completely to capture any of the magnificence such a film demands. Powell was best known as a TV actor, and it's probably his experience with television production that lead to The Conqueror seeming like such a small-time affair when held up against a film like The Egyptian. It was only Powell's second job as a director (he would only have three more, before dying in 1963), and there's absolutely nothing in his filmography to suggest that he had any idea how to film an epic. Making matters worse, the film had four cinematographers, none of whom were able to capture the grand scale the film needed. On the one hand, the fact that this was one of the first CinemaScope widescreen movies meant that you couldn't really expect the guys (Joseph LaShelle, William E. Snyder, Leo Tover, and Harry Wild) to have experience photographing a widescreen movie. On the other hand, they should have spent a lot more time studying silent era epics and the Cecil DeMille films from the 1930s. They managed to look more sweeping and vast than The Conqueror despite their lack of widescreen, color, and in many cases, sound. At the very least, they should have closely studied Leon Shamroy's work in 1953's The Robe to see what the new widescreen format was capable of delivering.

On the other hand, they may have shot tons of sweeping vistas and realized that it was easier to pass off the limited number of cast members as a horde if they just stuck with medium shots. As such, despite the fact that The Conqueror was shot widescreen, there's not much point to the format. Its ambition falls far short of its execution, and like director Dick Powell, the cinematographers ultimately turn in a film that feels like it was made for television despite the wide scope.

Made at an expense of $8 million -- no small sum in 1956 -- the Conqueror plays like a high school adaptation of an epic. Nothing ever clicks. Epic battles are promised, but they never really materialize, and in wide shots (the bread and butter of early CinemaScope films) you can see that the cast of thousands is really a cast of about forty or fifty. The rugged Utah exteriors are never photographed in a way that captures their grandeur as John Ford would with the same lead actor in countless other films. And as a stand-in for Mongolia, the deserts of Utah are a pretty questionable choice anyway. But then, I figure in 1956, the look of Mongolia was still pretty foreign to most Americans, so no one was really going to nitpick the red rock and dirt standing in for grasslands and the Gobi Desert.

When the action shifts indoors, and fans of epics expect huge sets draped in every piece of glittering finery the art department could stitch together, the film still fails to conjure that epic feel. Through the whole thing, all I could do (besides laugh myself silly at Wayne's acting) was think to myself, "They spent $8 million on this?" even the costumes look cheap and goofy. While other epics were putting a huge amount of effort into the perception (if not the reality) of realism, trying to create something that looked authentic even if it wasn't (the representation, rather than presentation, of history), everyone in The Conqueror rambles about in costumes that look like something a kid throws together the day before Halloween. I'm pretty sure Wayne's Genghis Khan outfit was assembled by the costume designer out of whatever was left over at the catering table. A metal bowl, a couple forks, and a tablecloth do not transform The Duke into a mighty 12th century Mongol warlord.

In place of world conquest, or even very much Mongolian conquest, the movie spends most of its time on the "I hate you I love you" relationship between the tempestuous Tartar princess and her would-be conqueror. Once again, a crummy script is saved by the mind-blowing acting that takes place between Hayward and Wayne. You guys know I much prefer to compliment a movie that fall back on, "So bad it's good," but if ever there was a movie besides Zombie 3 that fit the "so bad it's good" bill to a T, this is it. Words can scarcely describe it, and suddenly, whatever apprehensions you may have had about Hayward and John Wayne being cast as Mongolians are dismissed. Given the poor script, the lack of action, the threadbare attempts at epic sumptuousness, the remarkable miscasting and hammy acting of John Wayne suddenly looks like the film's one stroke of pure genius. It's the only thing that makes the movie tolerable.

Well, not the only thing. There are dancing girls, and some of the supporting cast -- though no more Mongolian than John Wayne -- are actually pretty good. Pedro Armendariz, beloved as Turkish secret agent Karim Bey from From Russia with Love, puts in a wonderful performance as Temujin's blood brother, Jamuga. He seems to be one of the only members of the cast that understands how to act in an epic. Epics demand that you ham it up a little and take things over the top. Witness Richard Burton in the previous year's The Robe. Charlton Heston had yet to come along and show everyone definitively, "THIS is how you act in an epic!" but Burton's performance was certainly not lacking in its lack of subtlety. It worked perfectly for the material and the colossal scale of the film. Wayne overacts, but not quite in the correct way. Armendariz nails it, but then, that's what he does with pretty much each of his characters. Lee Van Cleef doesn't really do much other than hang out by the campfire, but his presence is always welcome. And William Conrad is always all right. The rest of the cast, however, seems determined to give John Wayne a run for his money in the stilted delivery department.

Yet again, we find that the screenwriter -- Oscar Millard -- is, like the director and the cinematographers, far more experienced with television than movie making. For all his billions, you'd think Hughes could have hired a core film crew with more cinema than television experience. Had he done that, it's likely that The Conqueror would have looked and read a lot better than it does.

The only thing more notorious about this movie than Wayne's casting as Genghis Khan is the fact that it was shot in Utah's Escalante Desert, which in 1956 was the very recent site of atomic bomb testing. Exactly why producer Howard Hughes was so determined to use this location is something I don't know -- but then remember the guy did eventually start wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet -- but it was disastrous for the cast and crew of The Conqueror. Some ninety members of the cast and crew -- including Hayward, Armendariz, Agnes Moorehead (who plays John Wayne's mother and is best known as the meddlesome mother from television's Bewitched), director Dick Powell, and John Wayne himself -- died of cancer. High radiation levels at the locations for this film are one of the leading suspects, and with ninety people involved in this movie dying of cancer, it's hard to argue against the hypothesis. It's a damn goofy movie to have given your life for, even if you didn't know you were doing it at the time.

Producer and eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes didn't get cancer, but he did go batshit insane not too long after this movie. The $8 million he spent producing the film pales in comparison to the reported $12 million he spent to buy up all the prints and take it off the market. It was the last film he would ever make. Although the movie was soundly panned by pretty much everyone, the spectacle of widescreen and bright colors and the mighty Mongol Horde of a couple dozen guys was enough to snare curious viewers, especially on the global market (though Wayne's plan to either repair or destroy relations with the USSR by premiering the movie there was given the "nyet thanks" by the Russians once they previewed the movie), and The Conqueror managed to turn a profit for Hughes' dying RKO Pictures. Hughes himself apparently loved the movie as much as I do (and make no mistake -- I love this movie), even arranging frequent screenings of it at his estate. Eventually, I guess that cost him his friends, so he became increasingly protective of the movie and would only watch it by himself, reportedly while in the nude -- though given his maniacal dedication to reclusiveness at this point, I'm not sure how anyone knew what he was or was not wearing while watching the movie. I know I watched it in the nude, so I could get a better feel for Howard Hughes' thought process, and I am a better man for it. Thus began his $12 million campaign to remove it entirely from the global marketplace. Anyone who sat in on one of these screenings probably should have recognized his adoration of the Conqueror as Hughes' mental tipping point. In 1974, Paramount Pictures secured the rights to the movie, and John Wayne and his mighty Mongol hordes could once again be unleashed upon the world.

What the world discovered, or rediscovered, is that the movie is sort of cheap looking and kind of dull. It never delivers the majesty or thrills that people expected from an epic. It preoccupies itself with a chemistry-free but laugh-filled romance, and then it ends right as Temujin becomes Khan and starts thinking about conquering the world. In an era of mammoth sets, casts of thousands, and spectacles the likes of which no one had ever witnessed onscreen before (!), The Conqueror just looks sort of, well, half-assed. The fat that American icon John Wayne was cast as Genghis Khan, while initially the main thing that turns this film into a laughing stock, ends up being the only thing that really makes it tolerable, and luckily, Wayne's turn as the Khan is so phenomenally awful that it makes it pretty easy to coast through the movie. I don't think real Asians would get overly upset about a Caucasian being cast as one of the greatest figures in Asian -- and world -- history since the movie that results is so absurd. I would imagine they get as much of a kick out of watching The Duke swagger (actually, though no one wants to admit it, Wayne's trademark walk is actually more of a flamboyant sashay than a swagger) his way through such a mess of a film.

You could really stitch yourself together a fine "history of the Mongol peoples" if you sit down for a day full of nothing but movies about Mongols in which white people play all the Mongolian leads. The peplum films from the 1960s produced several Mongol/Tartar themed adventures. Jack Palance, who starred as Attila the Hun in the 1954 epic The Sign of the Pagan gets to paste on a fake Fu Manchu moustache for 1961's The Mongols, in which he seems determined to teach John Wayne a thing or two about chewing the scenery. Palance, in his trademark style, hisses, spews, bellows, and blusters his way through this mini-epic as Ogatai, the ambitious son of Genghis Khan. Not to be outdone by Susan Hayward's red-haired Tartar princess, The Mongols features blonde Swedish beauty Anita Ekberg as Hulina. The Mongols tells the story of the Great Khan's attempts to forge a peace with the Polish knights with whom he has been warring. This irks his aggressive son Ogatai to no end, and Ogatai embarks on his own campaign or war-making and pillaging despite his father's softening. Lucky for Ogatai, Genghis was just a little ways away from falling off his horse and dying.

The Mongols serves as sort of a prequel to three later peplum adventures (two of them featuring scripts by the same guys who wrote the Mongols), and starting with The Conqueror, then continuing with The Mongols, and finally going all out with the triple punch of Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World, Hercules Against the Mongols, and Hercules Against the Barbarians, you'd get a pretty solid understanding of history. Well, at least history as told by drunken filmmakers. It's fitting, however, that The Conqueror fits in so well with these later Italian productions, because it has much more in common with them than with the contemporary American epics with which it was attempting to compete when it was released. Heck, even some of these peplum films, made for a fraction of the price, contain more spectacle and scope than The Conqueror. And in case you were curious, no. Anita Ekberg and assorted Italian actors are no more convincing in their fake eyelids and Mongol make-up than Hayward and Wayne.

In A.D. 1227, the mighty conqueror Genghis Khan was dead, leaving the bulk of his ever-expanding empire in the hands of his son Ogatai (who I assume is still Jack Palance, even though that movie technically has nothing to do with these -- I just like imaging that Jack Palance is the son of Genghis Khan). His other three sons were left squabble over the scraps and try to one up one another in hopes of hoarding another crumb from the vastly more powerful Ogatai. And that's when Hercules showed up to defend the honor of Poland after seeking wisdom from an oracle in China...

History. Peplum films are, by their very nature, packed to the rim with history - almost all of it wildly inaccurate. Oh sure, it's true that the big bad Khan died in 1227 and left leadership to Ogatai. And it is indeed historical fact that Ogatai's less accomplished brothers spent a lot of time trying to stab one another in the back. Where exactly B.C. hero Hercules fits into the equation is anybody's guess. But there he is, in two separate films mind you, stymieing the Mongolian advance into Europe during the 13th Century -- a feat filmmakers almost could have gotten away with if they'd set the films during the first invasion of Europe during the 4th Century A.D. under the leadership of Attila the Hun (also Jack Palance if we keep stitching all these separate movies together into one fun-and-fact-filled history), during which the horde clashed with Roman legionnaires and a myriad of Europe's own barbarian tribes. One could almost buy Hercules, or at least some muscular guy in a tunic, handing out beatdowns. But we're in the Middle Ages now, well beyond the classical period when one expected demi-gods and centaurs to be mincing about meddling in the affairs of humans.

Not that it's worth quibbling over. If we accept Hercules, or Maciste, or any of these mythological heroes as men so heroic that no single era in time could possibly hope to contain their derring-do, then accepting a guy in out-of-era garb helping out the Poles or popping up in any other epoch becomes less worrisome, if indeed anyone was worried about Hercules showing up in the Middle Ages. We can then turn our minds away from the trivialities of historical particulars and focus our thoughts on more important matters, like how much hell raising the peplum films managed to pack into their history.

The historical hellraiser flavor of sword and sandal films fell into two basic categories - gladiator adventures and "hero liberates the masses" low-budget epics -- both of them more "realistic" than their more fantastical counterparts like Hercules, insofar as you consider a guy hurling around chariots and shaking the ground to cause an earthquake realistic. It's a relative term, after all. These films eschewed the world of gods and basilisks, harpies and magic spells. Although supernaturally strong, the heroes were never presented as anything other than mortal. Their enemies, likewise, were not demons and vampires, but regular men, often with some tenuous basis on actual people from history. Still, even within this subgenre, filmmakers liked to blend things together, resulting in plenty of "gladiators liberate the masses" type movies.

The cheaper films, many of them coming at the tail end of the peplum genre's popularity, when the Italian film industry suffered a crippling blow when several extravagant big-budget costumed epics flopped at the box office -- among them Hollywood co-productions like Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor and Sodom and Gomorrah -- were the gladiator films that drew inspiration, but not necessarily scale, from films like the 1959 epic Ben Hur starring Charlton Heston and the 1960 Stanley Kubrick epic Spartacus with Kirk Douglas. Because of the impact of the major flops, the b-level gladiator films found themselves harnessed with increasingly tiny budgets, though the lack of means to achieve their imagined scope didn't stop many of the films from being action-packed fun and often looking better than the relatively giant-budget The Conqueror. Italian directors mastered reducing the proverbial cast of thousands into a cast of a few dozen shot to look like a cast of thousands, which was more than Dick Powell was able to do. Many of the actors were extras and background characters with few, if any, lines and could thus be cast and recast in a variety of roles to save time and money. Take off that Roman helmet, slap on this mustache, and you're a whole new character. Directors didn't even need to hire professional actors. Since many of the scenes were high on fight scenes and stunts but low on talking and drama, they could flesh out the cast with stuntmen in various roles.

"Hero liberates the masses" films were usually a tad more lavish, though even they could be on the sparse end of detail from time to time. These films compensated for rote plots by transporting the hero to exotic, far-away lands, though they were still lands more or less grounded in reality. Once again, the story was almost always the same: a tyrant brutally oppresses a population, often with some situation involving a forced marriage to a noble princess in order to legitimize his usurping of the throne, until the beefcake hero walks up, usually out of nowhere and completely at random, and joins the struggle against the villains even though he himself has no personal stake in the battle. In the words of Gordon Scott from Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World, in which our loincloth-sporting peplum hero liberates China from Mongol occupation of Kublai Khan, "I am not Chinese, but it doesn't matter anyway. I will always fight against injustice wherever it may be." The hero is motivated purely by a sense of altruism, a desire to oppose villainy and release the masses from the shackles of oppression. For the hero in these movies, the desire to do good and combat totalitarianism is motivation enough. Of course, the films usually threw in a love interest -- most likely the princess - to give the hero that extra push.

Whatever historical accuracy might slip into the peplum films was still nothing more than a backdrop for the muscleman action, and famous names and places were bandied about wit the same disregard for reality as the mythological names had been thrown around without consideration for their actual role in the original stories. Hercules Against the Barbarians, for example, features Genghis Khan (John Wayne, remember) being murdered by his treacherous son, Kublai. In reality, Genghis died from injuries sustained after he fell from his horse, and Kublai was his grandson. But what can you do? Treachery in the Mongol throne room can't be bound by facts, and the Mongols seemed a particularly popular opponent for the hero in the historical hellraiser peplums. And while they may indeed have invaded both China and Eastern Europe, there seems to be a lack of verifiable evidence that their schemes and dreams of conquest were thwarted time and again by a glistening bodybuilder in a loincloth - twice by Mark Forest alone!

Hercules Against the Mongols (1963) picks up the action immediately after the death of Genghis in 1227 and focuses on the backstabbing lesser sons of his who have to deal with Maciste as he comes to the aid of an embattled people, engages in a little Mongolian style wrestling, and swats a lot of people with tree trunks. It can also be seen as an almost legitimate sequel to The Mongols since the same writers -- Alessandro Ferrau and Luciano Martino -- penned both films. We first meet Maciste (yes, despite the title, the hero is Maciste) as he is strolling through 13th century China. In an opening that is pretty much de rigueur for a peplum film, he meets a woman, this time a cute Chinese fortuneteller, who informs him that he has long and difficult journeys ahead of him. Frankly, if Maciste has been trekking for over two thousand years, going from one arduous situation to the next, and he still needs an oracle to tell him that bad times are a-brewin', then he really is kind of dense.

Genghis Khan's sons are busy trying to oppress the masses while, at the same time, secretly backstab each other to get more power. And then along comes Maciste, who I guess walked over from China or wherever he was. It would seem like a long walk, but maybe, you know, being muscular and all, he could do that thing like the Incredible Hulk used to do where he could jump really high and far to cover long distances in a short amount of time. Maciste kicks some Mongolian tail, and then befriends the beleaguered population of white people. The sons of the Khan are annoyed that this beefy Greek has strolled thousands of years into the future and across the largest continent in the world in a matter of days, but they are torn asunder over what to do with him. The obvious answer is "kill him." But going with the obvious answer is why you won't ever rule the world like the Mongols. One of the sons of Genghis, Sayan (played by Caucasian Ken Clark in the usual fake eyelids and wig) , decides it would be better if he tried to be all buddy-buddy with Hercules and get him on his side. After all, no one really ever failed to benefit from having a demigod behind their cause. Plus, you know, they're just two beefy tough guys with a lot to tell each other about protein shakes and the various "ab roller" type machines, which of course, is a subject that causes the mighty Maciste to stand with arms akimbo and laugh heartily. Real men don't use AbFlex. Real men do leg lifts and pull-ups.

So they manage to capture Maciste, or rather, he sort of just walks up to them and gets captured after his tactic of going, "Hey, why not call off the conquest of the world?" doesn't pan out the way he planned. Of course, at this point in the life cycle of the peplum genre, we have a pretty good idea of what a brilliant strategist he was. If it's more complicated than hurling boulders or doing that stunt where a guy jumps at you really high and you just sort of help him arc over you and into his buddies, well then it's probably too complex for Maciste. Why do those guys always jump a foot above their target's head? I mean, even if Maciste didn't lift his arms up and sort of help them on over, they still weren't even close to hitting him.

Sayan puts Maciste is chains but is generally pretty nice to him, hoping that Maciste will join him after the hero learns a little more about traditional Mongol puppet theater and throat singing. Maciste gets to fight in a tournament, because all peplum films must have a tournament. If he wins, he gets to choose either his own freedom or the freedom of a captured European princess, who of course, instantly falls madly in love with Maciste. Sayan's plan was for Maciste to kick ass on the first two evil brothers but then throw the fight for his friendly captor, thus making the others look like dolts while the other one looks all cool and tough. Maciste gets carried away though and just kicks everyone's ass, thereby winning the freedom of the princess but not winning any points with Sayan.

It all results in a lot of spear throwing, hearty laughing a-plenty, and Maciste kicking a lot of Mongol tail and then strutting around heroically. There's plenty of action, and for once, Maciste's foil isn't a sniveling king who uses brains and cunning to thwart the forces of good. Ken Clark as Genghis' son, Sayan, is an imposing figure that looks every inch the match for Mark Forest. Likewise for Renato Rossini and his shaved head (looking sort of like that guy jean-Claude Van Damme fought in Kickboxer). Mark Forest movies, in fact, made a habit of casting their star against equally powerful looking villains rather than following the tried and true path of keeping everyone scrawny in order to make the hero look that much bigger.

Everyone must have had a good time filming Hercules Versus the Mongols, because practically the entire cast, along with director Domenico Paolella, returned for Hercules Against the Barbarians. This film begins more or less where the previous one left off, with the Mongols in retreat and Mark Forest standing victorious over all. Since this isn't an actual sequel, a few things are out of place between the two films. For one, instead of the big shaggy guy being one of the naughty sons of Genghis Khan, he is now Kublai (is it possible that no famous Caucasian has ever played Kublai Khan? I must have just missed the movie). Second, Genghis is still alive and kicking, or at least alive and looking kind of old and gray. Kublai is now the son of Genghis rather than grandson, but that makes sense seeing how those Mongolian warlords were always ambitious and trying to move up in the ranks. Rather than have Genghis just fall off his horse and die, here he becomes the victim of the usual sword and sandal throne room scheming that requires men with beards to grab one another by the shoulder and whisper while lurking in the shadows. But if we ignore the names and pretend that, oh let's say the guy called Kublai is called Ogatai and the guy called Genghis is, I don't know, Steve, then it just about works as a sequel to Hercules Versus the Mongols, even if the history is still dubious.

Ostensibly this film is about the Mongol plot to get revenge on Hercules (Maciste, as usual) by kidnapping his main squeeze, who also just happens to be the princess of the realm, and Maciste's quest to rescue her, perform impressive feats of strength while touring with a troupe of acrobats and magicians, and throw guys across the room. However, much of the film focuses on the machinations within the Mongol court as Kublai and his brother plot to overthrow their father. In case you were getting worried, yes there is indeed a treacherous princess who will be swayed by Maciste's manly charms, and yes there is a midget.

Coming as it did in 1964, Hercules against the Barbarians was a relative latecomer to the peplum game, and the genre had just about run its course. Sets are a bit sparser, though the Mongols manage to drape themselves and their court in lots of fur. At the same time, however, being near the tail end of the parade means the film sports a lot of seasoned players. Mark Forest is really in the swing of things, and while this isn't his best film, he seems to be having fun. The action scenes continue to impress as once again, Forest squares off against opponents more or less his own size. Ken Clark and Renato Rossini both reprise their roles from the previous films, more or less. Technically they're different characters, but since they look, act, and dress the same as they did in Hercules Versus the Mongols, we can just let it slide. Gloria Miland, who stars as the lovely Arias, had already been in peplum such as Atlas Against the Czar, Goliath and the Rebel Slave, Fury of Achilles, and Goliath and the Giants. Hercules Against the Barbarians was her final sword and sandal film (as it would be for many of the cast). She spent the latter half of the 1960s appearing in a variety of spaghetti westerns, including 1967's Hate for Hate, which was directed by Domenico Paolella. Paolella himself turned in a final few peplum films before also making the switch to westerns, spy films, and a brief stint in the sexy nunsploitation arena in the early 1970s.

Of course, the fact that so many people had so much experience with the genre by 1964 also means that Hercules Against the Barbarians can feel more than a tad paint by numbers at times. Most obvious among its many conventional moments and cut corners is the fact that they chose to take the same cast in the same costumes as the production everyone just finished. It's a move almost worthy or Roger Corman, like they wrapped Hercules Versus the Barbarians a few days early and decided to keep everyone around for those last few days under contract and make a new movie. Luckily, paint by numbers can still be fun. While the movie may not offer up much to the viewer in terms of originality or twist, it ably if unspectacularly handles the conventions and delivers on all the expectations. Forest has a natural charisma that makes you want to keep watching even if the events themselves are overly familiar.

Although made before the two Mark Forest films, 1961's Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World takes place after them historically speaking. It also marks the debut sword and sandal mini-epic for Gordon Scott, perhaps the genre's most versatile performer. The action finds our hero Samson, who is of course originally called Maciste, wandering for no good reason through China, where he must join with the rebels to overthrow the right evil Mongols. Once again and as always, Maciste/Samson shows up in the thick of things completely at random. Some Mongolian soldiers are beating on some Chinese peasants, and Maciste simply walks up and starts kicking ass. Where did he come from? How did he get there? Wasn't he in Peru last week, battling the Sons of the Sun? These questions will never be answered with anything more than vague references such as, "I have wandered long and far." Maciste walks the earth forever in search of injustice, and he makes pretty good time.

The Mongolian history as rulers of China was short and far from sweet. Marco Polo, who made his famed journey along the Silk Road with his father and arrived in the court of Kublai Khan during the days of the Yuan Dynasty, documented their one unified time of dominion over China in the West (though he failed to include any accounts of Maciste, which makes his work historically dubious). Marco Polo's account of his years in China is short on details regarding the actual Chinese. Keen to woo allies and trading partners in the West, Kublai kept his visitors steeped in the pageantry of upper echelon court life, so much so that in his entire exhaustive tome on the experience, Marco Polo hardly mentions the ethnic Chinese at all, leaving that particular historical avenue to be explored by Chinese scholars and Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World.

While the Yuan Dynasty may have been short-lived, the role of China's rowdy neighbors to the north as perpetual thorns in the side of the Middle Kingdom stretches for centuries, and that wall they kept working on was only slightly more successful a deterrent to trouble-making than Hadrian's idea to construct a wall to contain those rambunctious Celts that were giving the Romans such a hard time up in the northern reaches of Britain. The later Sung Dynasty of China, dedicated as they were to the pursuit of art and intellectualism and the betterment of the human mind and soul, found their superior intellect no match for Mongolian weaponry. After losing bits and pieces of their country for so long and constantly attempting to control the Mongol hordes through acts of appeasement, the Chinese finally lost the whole enchilada with the sacking of Beijing and establishment of the Yuan Dynasty, the first foreign force to occupy the whole of the country and also the shortest dynasty in Chinese history, lasting only from 1271 to 1368.

Ironically, it was the successful conquest of China that initiated the unraveling of the Mongolian empire thanks in part to the undermining of the Khan's standard operating procedure. The Mongolian approach had always been to slaughter the vanquished en masse, raze their cities, and transform everything into grazing lands for the vast Mongolian herd. You don't become the world' fiercest cavalry without a few horses, after all. Some people take over the world to increase their wealth and tax their base, others their power and sense of security, and still others as a way of obtaining a vast workforce of slaves. The Mongols, on the other hand, saw the world as one big pasture.

China was a different creature, however, than say the steppes of Russia and chunks of Eastern Europe populated by disconnected fiefdoms and tribes. It was too vast, too populous, and though defeated on the field of combat, too crafty to allow itself to suffer such a fate. China couldn't be turned into grazing land, and to run China the Mongols would need the Chinese. As the Chinese official Yeh-lu Ch'u-tsai once told Genghis Khan when captured during one of the many Mongol raids into the country, "You can conquer China on horseback, but you have to dismount to rule her." Yeh-tu thus helped save Peking from the same slice-n-slaughter approach that decimated other cities, though some would also call him a collaborationist and traitor. It was his influence over the Khan, however, that convinced the warrior the Chinese were more valuable if spared, as their role as skilled craftsmen and taxable subjects would be of greater benefit to the Mongolian empire than any kicks they might get out of burning everything down and beheading all the people.

When Kublai completed the conquest of China between 1272-1279 and established the Yuan Dynasty in 1277, he unwittingly set into motion a series of events that would prove to be the undoing of the whole empire. He moved the imperial capital from Karakorum to Peking. His own brother, hungry for power, conspired against him at every turn. Upon Kublai's death in 1295, the expanses of the empire refused to take orders from the new leader in Peking. Khanites in the west near Iran and Turkey, the officials of which had converted to Islam, regarded the Peking Khan as a religious infidel, himself having recently converted to Llamist Buddhism. With an empire so great and no particular religion of their own that they felt like imposing on people, the Mongols were famously cosmopolitan when it came to tolerance of foreign religions. It was simply easier not to give a damn. The adoption of certain "official" religions however, meant that the religious diversity of the empire was starting to work against itself, as one faction refused to be ruled by another of a different religion. In 1368, after an uprising by Chinese peasants who sensed Mongolian power was faltering, the Yuan Dynasty came to an unceremonious and bloody end. Mongols and their collaborators were chased out of the country or executed, and the newly formed Ming Dynasty, much like Warren Harding's campaign for U.S. president in the wake of World War I, promised a return to normalcy. The Mongols were then occupied with stitching together their homeland, giving the world a respite from their lust for territory until another Mongol leader arose, this time named Timor. He would forge a new Mongolian empire as vast as anything seen before, piling up the heads of his enemies in great warning towers, but since he never locked horns with Hercules, we'll leave it up to the history books to tell Timor's story.

This whole era of turmoil serves as the backdrop for Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World starring a primed and fresh off his Tarzan movies Gordon Scott as Samson, a.k.a. Maciste, who has strolled to China in order to help put an end to the oppression. If we use this film as a basis for reality, and I can see no reason why we wouldn't, then the downfall of the Mongolian Empire was actually caused when Samson, after being buried by a dwarf, started punching the ground until he caused an earthquake, burst forth from his tomb, then lead the Chinese in revolt against their cruel masters. And oh yeah, he also rescued a beautiful princess, because that's what he does, and what's the point of overthrowing tyrants if you don't also get to liberate a beautiful princess?

The princess in this case is Eurasian Yoko Tani (an actual Asian???), a familiar face to many fans of European fantasy and spy films from the 1960s. She had been working in film since 1953, primarily in French productions but also with one Japanese movie (Women in Prison, 1956) and the Eastern European sci-fi adventure First Spaceship on Venus (1959) and a couple scattered English language productions on her resume, including a small role in the 1958 version of The Quiet American. Although she'd gotten some sword and sandal-esque experience in France while making a comedic version of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Seven Miracles is her first turn in a true peplum. Her only other sword and sandal credits include 1961's Marco Polo directed by Witch's Curse director Piero Pierotti, and 1962's Ursus and the Tartar Princess directed by Remigo del Grosso, who went on to direct a whole slew of enjoyable spaghetti westerns and spy films during the remainder of the decade. Both films, as you might guess, deal in one way or another with more Mongolians (the Tartars being a particular tribe in Mongoila who endlessly irked and warred with Genghis Khan, getting the guy so mad that he eventually decided to conquer the world). I'[m sure I can fit them into the history of Mongolia as told by Caucasians in fake eyelids that I have managed to stitch together so far, but until I actually get to see those two movies, they'll remain missing links in my shockingly accurate look at Mongolian history.

Tani herself made the transition to Eurospy films and starred in a number of slick mid- to low-budget espionage thrillers, including turns in two British espionage series: the obscure but interesting Man in a Suitcase and the highly acclaimed Patrick McGoohan show Secret Agent. She was active on and off through the decades until her death in 1999 after a bout with cancer.

Also on hand are a slew of peplum regulars. Helene Chanel makes as convincing a Mongol princess as Susan Hayward and Anita Ekberg, but she carries herself with grace and beauty, so it's not worth complaining about. Considering her filmography contains some of the weirdest sword and sandal films ever made, including Witch's Curse and Conquerors of Atlantis, passing herself off as Asian is the least of her stretches.

Eventually, Samson must tackle a careening chariot (a scene later used as a flashback in Witch's Curse) and, after seeking the counsel of a Buddhist monk, perform the seven miracles, some of which have apparently already been performed. It's never really made clear exactly what the miracles are, and I'm not certain even the monk remembers them all correctly. Thus is just sort of rambles on for a spell then says, "And umm, yeah. So the main miracle is to go ring the bell of freedom. If you do that one and, oh say, shake a mountain, then we'll just say all seven miracles have been performed." Samson rings the bell, gets buried alive beneath a mountain by a midget, and then causes an earthquake as he unleashes all his might and fury to break free!

Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World benefits greatly from top-notch action scenes anchored by Gordon Scott, skilled direction by old hand Riccardo Freda (Giants of Thessaly, The Witch's Curse), and beautiful sets that look far more lavish than the budget should allow. The medieval Chinese towns and the mountain temple look thoroughly authentic, or at least as authentic as something you'd find in a Shaw Brothers kungfu film. Of course, there are a few missteps, the most obvious one being that there are apparently very few Asians in China, and there's not much attempt to hide he shortage of Chinese looking actors. A few Asian extras are sprinkled here and there amid a slew of Italians with Fu Manchu mustaches pasted on, which at least makes this more authentically Asian than The Conqueror. Actually, some of the mustaches don't even look like stereotypical Fu Manchu mustaches, leading one to wonder not so much why Maciste is in China, but instead why so many people in China look like Pancho Villa. Gabriele Antonini (last seen as Temujin alongside Jack Palance's Ogatai, though he wasn't the Temujin who became Ghengis Khan) plays our nominal local hero, Cho. Never has a Chinese hero looked so much like a cross between Frankie Avalon and Ray Romano. Someone apparently thought that people might find all these Caucasian looking Chinese to be a bit suspicious, so they threw in a line for Cho where he sort of off-handedly says, "You know, I'm only half Chinese." They didn't even spring for fake eyelids.

There's almost an historical excuse for the film's lack of authentic Asians, however, since the Yuan Dynasty of the Mongolians surrounded itself with foreigners and employed officials from all over their empire. The film seems unconcerned with such trivialities, however, a disregard that is not all that important and is best exemplified by the scenes in which Maciste, towering over everyone else, clad in a loin cloth, and looking huge and Caucasian, "blends in" with the locals.

As enjoyable as it is, and despite some names sounding familiar, I'd not depend entirely on this quintet of films to learn about the historical events depicted within (I think you'll have to see Ursus and the Tartar Prince and Marco Polo starring Yoko Tani before you can be fully informed about history). Whatever the case, you can't really, consider yourself to have in your possession a well-rounded knowledge of the Mongol invasions unless you watch The Conqueror starring John Wayne, The Mongols with Jack Palance, and the trio of peplum Mongol adventures. Get all of these under your belt, and then you can impress your pipe-smoking, spectacle-wearing intellectual friends in their tweed jackets with the suede patches on the elbows. Being the slaves to traditional learning that they are, those pointy-headed Poindexters are probably completely ignorant of the role Samson, Hercules, and Maciste played in liberating China and Eastern Europe from the iron grip of Mongol tyranny.

At this point, one almost starts to wonder if a movie other than Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure has ever been made that fills the role of Genghis, Ogatai, or Kublai with an Asian. From John Wayne's cowboy Khan to Ken Clark's muscleman antics, from red-headed and blonde Tartar and Mongol princesses, to a lone actual Asian in Yoko Tani, all of these movies are so silly that there's no point in getting in a huff about the casting of Caucasians as Mongols. What's more shocking is that cheap Italian muscleman movies manage to be far more interesting, action-packed, sumptuous, and "epic" than the supposedly epic Howard Hughes-John Wayne fiasco.

And so Genghis waits, sitting on his big-ass fur-covered throne, waiting for a proper movie to be made about his conquests (though I guess Al Leong in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure came pretty close). If nothing else, he can breathe a sigh of relief (just as we fans of bad movies mourn) that, although he was once portrayed by John Wayne, it seems the proposed modern epic about his life has died a quiet death before ever entering pre-production. And just as Hughes could imagine no one better than John Wayne to play Genghis Khan, whoever it was that was going to produce the new movie had a similar dedication, a vision of the one man in the world who could finally do the magnificent Khan justice. That man?

Steven Seagal.

Labels: Fantasy: Peplum, Historical Epics, Stars: Gordon Scott, Stars: Jack Palance, Stars: John Wayne, Stars: Mark Forest, Year: 1956, Year: 1961, Year: 1963, Year: 1964