Potomok Chingis-Khana (Storm over Asia) (The Heir to Genghis Khan) (1929)

Originally Potomak Chingis-khan (The Heir to Genghis Khan), Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia is set in Central Asia in 1920. Valeri Inkijinov plays a young Mongolian trapper ostracized from his village after he is cheated out of a valuable fox fur by a European trader. Becoming a Soviet partisan, the trapper is thrust into prominence when it is learned that he is descended from Genghis Khan. The occupying English army (identified as the White Russian army in foreign prints of the film, downplaying the West's effort to secure a stronghold in Russia in the years following the revolution) puts the trapper in charge of a puppet Mongolian government. By film's end, however, the "puppet" has cut the strings in a spectacular fashion. "Spectacular" is indeed the appropriate word for this sweeping political drama, which though not a huge success with domestic audiences upon its first release, is now regarded as one of Pudovkin's finest efforts. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi