His eldest son, James, rose to fame as a child in one of Soviet Russia’s most famous movies, The Circus (1936), about a white circus performer forced to flee America after giving birth to a mixed-race child. The movie ends happily, with the young woman finding a home in the racially tolerant Soviet society where all races were supposedly considered equal. It was, in many ways, the perfect Communist propaganda movie which had originally been sought in the unfinished movie Hughes wrote about.
