Epstein’s first feature for Films Albatros was a star vehicle for the Russian-born sensation, Ivan Mosjoukine, best known to film history as the human face of the Kuleshov experiment. In The Lion of the Moguls he plays a Tibetan prince who becomes a movie star in France. The film’s Tibetan prologue pays homage to Cecil B. DeMille’s spectaculars, but the subsequent backstage scenes suggest a more cutting assessment of the movie business. Epstein reserves his finest impressionist effects for the prince’s surrender to the lures of the city. The sequence in which he stands like a charioteer in a speeding taxi remains a classic depiction of the crack-up.