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Genghis Khan
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1950 / B&W
Director: Manuel Conde (credited to Lou Salvador)
Screenwriters: Manuel Conde & Carlos V. Francisco
English Narration Written by James Agee & Read by John Storm
Producer: MC Productions
Cast: Manuel Conde, Elvira Reyes, Inday Jalandoni, Jose Villafranca, Lou Salvador, Africa de la Rosa, Darmo Acosta, Juan Monteiro, Andres Centenera, Ric Bustamante, Ely Nakpil, Leon Lizares, Tony Cruz
Temujin and his fellow Mongol tribespeople are attacked by a rival tribe led by Burchou. He is soon captured but manages to escape. Upon returning to his village, he learns that his father was killed by Burchou’s men. In his quest for vengeance, he and his army bring down his enemy’s camp. But when he meets Burchou’s daughter, Lei Hai, Temujin’s resolve is put to the test.
As a then-prosperous US-aligned neocolonial entity during the Cold War, the Philippines could presume to appropriate and spoof, however good-naturedly, another country’s highly cherished historical figure—something it may never be able to do again today—and garner accolades in the process. Those fortunate enough to have attended any of the last few screenings of Manuel Conde’s musical comedies will be able to aver that his true genius lay in contemporary satire. To Genghis Khan’s advantage, it manifests his capacity for razor-sharp social commentary dispensed with madcap humor, bridging both the meaningful ebullience of Bahala Na (Come What May, 1957) and the caustic critiques of his long-running also-lost Juan Tamad (Lazy Juan) series (1947, 1948, 1959, 1960, 1963).[1] The original Genghis Khan print, presumed gone for good, ran for much longer than the hour-and-a-half version that was dubbed in English and sent to the Berlin International Film Festival. As a measure of Conde’s achievement, Howard Hughes subsequently produced Hollywood’s own Genghis Khan version, Dick Powell’s The Conqueror (1956), featuring an all-American icon, John Wayne; the movie wound up on a canon listing of its own—Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss’s The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (And How They Got That Way) (Popular Library, 1978).
Note
[1] Some of the final screenings of still-available Manuel Conde musicals were for the one-shot Focus on Filipino Films module of the 1983 edition of the Manila International Film Festival (where I’d been a technical assistant), including Ikaw Kasi (You’re the Cause, 1955) and Basta Ikaw (As Long as It’s You, 1957); both were ironically earlier made than Bahala Na, with the former in a monochrome print although it was also supposedly processed in Eastmancolor. While The Conqueror (1956), the US Genghis Khan counterpart, is generally regarded with derision, mention must also be made that the cast and crew suffered from nearly twice the normal incidence of cancer, with director Dick Powell and actors John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Pedro Armendáriz, and Lee Van Cleef (not all of them smokers) dying from it. Although the federal government announced that their film locale, downwind from a then-still-active nuclear testing site, was safe from radioactive fallout, the fact that even family and guests who visited the production were also subsequently diagnosed with various forms of the disease strongly suggests that an epidemic of illness befell the production. (See Rory Carroll, “Hollywood and the Downwinders Still Grapple with Nuclear Fallout,” The Guardian, June 6, 2015.)
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