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.