Stars: Valeri Inkizhanov, Anna Sten, Boris Barnet, L. Belinskaya, Alexander Chistyakov, I. Dedintsev, K. Gurniak, I. Inkishanov, F. Ivanov, Anel Sudakevich, Viktor Tsoppi

Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin

Summary: Set in Mongolia under the rule of British Occupation Forces, this dramatic story tells of a young trapper who appears to be a long-lost descendant of Genghis Khan. The people plan to set him up as Prince Genghis Khan the Second, the film climaxing with him leading a revolt against the British. Silent with musical soundtrack.

Although the story was originally regarded as little more than a trifle by Pudovkin, something to be shot on a working vacation, it took on a life of its own once production began. The film, known in the Soviet Union as THE HEIR TO GENGHIS KHAN, stars Valeri Inkizhinov as Bair, a Mongolian fur trapper. At the fur market, Bair is cheated by a British fur trader who takes a valuable fox fur from him without paying the market rate. Bair attacks the British trader and quickly takes off, knowing the repercussions of his action. English army occupation troops light out after Bair, who has joined a resistance force fighting the occupiers. After running him down, the British rob and shoot the trapper, leaving him for dead. However, when a missionary translates the text on an amulet that the soldiers had stolen from Bair, a talisman left him by chance, it identifies him as a descendant of Genghis Khan's. The British commanding officer (I. Dedintsev) hatches a plan to use Bair's heritage to set him up as a puppet dictator who will unite the region's rebellious factions. Although dense with machine-gun montage, the film is slightly less experimental than the director's previous work and, given the epic thrust of its narrative, can simply be viewed as an adventure, sans politics.

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The last of the three great films that VI Pudovkin directed in the 1920s, Storm Over Asia(1928) is an acknowledged classic of Soviet silent cinema. Filmed largely on location in Mongolia, the film has an authentic documentary feel, though the story is a stirring melodrama, about a young fur trapper who is mistreated by the occupying forces in the civil war and becomes a leader of the partisans. Pudovkin enjoys caricaturing the foreign (British) troops and the medieval rituals of a Buddhist temple, but it's out on the steppes that he really comes into his own, with panoramic shots of the vast landscapes. Together with The Mother(1926) and The End of St Petersburg(1927), Storm Over Asia(also known as "The Heir to Genghis Khan") entitles Pudovkin to be ranked with Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov as a master of the Soviet montage style, which he expounded in his book Film Technique(1929).

On the DVD: The print, though not perfect, is of fair quality and a new score by Timothy Brock complements the images nicely. However, the so-called "Introduction" turns out to be just a few lines of text scrolling down the screen, telling you less than the information appearing on the sleeve notes. --Ed Buscombe

Aspect Ratio:	4:3 Full Frame
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Interactive Menus, Introduction To Storm Over Asia
Year:	1928
Release Date:	April 9, 2001
Runtime:	125 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	E K A 40032
Keywords:	Asia, General, Khan, Over, Silent, Storm, Genghis, Drama, Heir, Khana, Chingis, Potomok
Genre:	Drama