This I first saw when a child, on New York's WOR-TV's 'Million Dollar Movie' - which repeated a film at least a dozen times in each week! Back then we had only B&W television and the film aired in full-screen/pan-&-scan. Yet for me and my brother and our cousins this was a worthy howler - full of fantastic, fabulous freaky people and creatures, many of them, and their adventures, done in belly-laugh-provoking Ginsu special effects. I think we watched every one of the weeklong WOR-TV telecastings of this weird but most impressive film which was, by the way, shown under the title 'The Sword and the Dragon.' a title that appealed much more to us youngsters than would have 'Ilya Mouromets' of whom we knew naught.

Though we didn't realize it when we first saw 'Ilya Mouromets,' we were properly awed by the legions of extras swarming and piling up into a human massif before our widened eyes; and despite its many laughable - and we did laugh and howl at them even when we were kids - it's an enchanting film chock-full of unexpected, surprising vignettes and exploits and (much-softened, I think) Tugar cruelties.

Of course as children we recognized in 'Ilya Mouromets' no Soviet propaganda, and the film inspirited in us no everlasting Communist harm, though it is to be acknowledged by the genuinely thinking, objective truth-insistent adult into whom I matured, a superb bit of propaganda thinly concealing the Soviet Union's groupthink-encouraging, politically correct anti-Red Chinese orthodoxy of that unspeakably Evil Empire's day. Thus there's a lesson to be taken from this film by today's sheeplike mass of uncritically-misthinking fashionable Hollywood lefty-clones for whom so-called "multiculturalism" is but one misbegotten "blame America first" prop of their craven ideocratic visions - and which prop is, of course, the patently repulsive ideocratic negative of 'Ilya Mourmets's' colorful, yet equally patently repulsive, orthodox xenophobia and racialism.

'Ilya Mouromets' is to be appreciated for its historically evident conception and malevolence, but it still works on the superficial level of child-like, fabulous, howling-good entertainment. Methinks no film buff ought to deprive himself of seeing it, apprehending its despicable Soviet propaganda message, and yet enjoying its tremendous entertainment value. In fifty years time no such entertainment value will, sadly, likely be accredited to the groupthunk, "I can be more politically correct than you can," lefty-orthodox films that Hollywood and European cinema have been mass-producing for at least the last forty years.