[Reily]

That’s news to me! Maybe true!

It’s a stinker of a movie. His other very forgettable film even if its closer to his normal roles is Jet Pilot. It has great airborne scenes with F86 jets connected by boring (So boring they had to be purposely written that way!) scenes with him interacting with a good looking blonde babe. She’s supposed to be a defecting Soviet pilot.

In summary: Airborne scenes are great! Anything with people in it is bad!

[Cronos]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049092/trivia/?item=tr0713839

In The Hollywood Hall of Shame, John Wayne visited Dick Powell’s office in 1953 to discuss scripts for the final film of his three-picture deal with RKO. Powell stepped out of the office for a few minutes. . When he returned, he found Wayne holding a script that Powell had literally thrown into the wastebasket. It was the script for The Conqueror, which had been written for Marlon Brando. Wayne aggressively insisted that this was the movie he wanted to make

Powell explicitly tried to talk Wayne out of it, knowing the script was a poor fit for a cowboy star. Wayne refused to back down, leveraging his immense star power to force RKO to greenlight the project. Powell later famously justified giving in by asking, “Who am I to turn down John Wayne?”

https://www.jimcarrollsblog.com/blog/2017/8/16/the-bin-or-the-bottom-drawer-learning-when-to-dispose-of-an-idea-and-when-to-save-it-for-a-rainy-day

He treated the job seriously - but he was miscast and HE didn’t realize it until after the movie released and was panned

[Cronos]

I loved Jet Pilot - not for the plot (which I can't remember) but for Janet Leigh!