The Emperor of California was originally to have been a Hollywood project for Sergei Eisenstein. Instead, the film was given to German actor-director Luis Trenker, who scripted a political allegory about a European revolutionary who flees to America in 1834, where he becomes the leader of an immigrant community and later gains power as a U.S. senator and army general before he is finally brought down. Winner of the Best Film award at Venice in 1936, the film was banned by both the Americans and Russians after World War II as a result of Trenker’s work for the Third Reich.