Storm Over Asia

Made immediately after the completion of The End of St Petersburg, Pudovkin's semi-ethnographic, semi-polemical epic about a Mongol uprising against British occupiers during the post-revolutionary civil war makes a striking, but for all that slightly naive fable. Adapted from a Novokshenov novel, the story has a young Mongol herdsman falling out with a scurrilous colonial fur trader and falling in with partisan fighters. When he's captured by the Brits, they take him for a descendant of Genghis Khan and mistakenly install him as a puppet ruler. Pudovkin's satire is notably subtler than Eisenstein's - he extracts some lovely comedy from the imperial elite and Buddhist religious authorities exchanging ritual pleasantries in front of a new-born Lama - and the storytelling and low key characterisation are certainly engaging. It's just that Pudovkin's strict, building block editing, proficient as it is, tends to cramp the film's flow and suggestive space.