"Actor: Karl Gurnyak"

• Storm Over Asia | DVD | (09/04/2001) from £4.98   |  Saving you £17.00 (568.56%)   |  RRP £19.99

  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