Bruce Loeb on Piano (Potomok Chingis-Khan/The Heir to Genghis-Khan). The last film in V. I. Pudovkin's "crisis of conscience" trilogy (with Mother and The End of St. Petersburg), Storm Over Asia is an epic, at once heroic and ironic, of an exploited Mongolian hunter who eventually rises to rout out the occupying British forces. Joining the partisans after being cheated by an English fur trader, young Bair is captured and executed...almost. When an amulet identifying him as a descendent of Genghis-Khan is found among his effects, he is hastily patched up and installed as a puppet king. During a party of foreign society notables, the King becomes revolted (an image out of Surrealism's canon), and instigates an uprising-the storm over Asia. The Surrealists recognized in the film the central conflict between colonizer and colonized. "Storm Over Asia is the film of the destiny of the Occident, although its action takes place in the heart of Asia, on the plateaus of Tibet" (Robert Desnos). Moreover, there was much for them to appreciate in Pudovkin's lyrical/psychological montage style, culminating in the over-the-top storm scene containing "all the dust and debris that Pudovkin could imagine...But how else was Pudovkin to end a film subject whose attraction for him had been its fable and exotic imagery, except by hyperbole?" (Jay Leyda, Kino). Nor would the interventionist general's visit to the Grand Lama, who turns out to be a baby, have escaped the Surrealists' sense of marvelous absurdity.