Alexander Nevsky

Eisenstein’s first completed sound film is one of the cinema’s great epics, an operatic historical pageant of astonishing visual grandeur, set to a stirring original score by Prokofiev. In beleaguered 13th-century Russia, the valiant, volatile Prince Nevsky of Novgorod (Nikolai Cherkassov) is chosen to lead his countrymen into battle against invading Teutons. Eisenstein's spectacular film culminates in a monumental, much-celebrated Battle on the Ice, featuring a cast of thousands. The work was made at a time of increasing tension between the Soviet Union and Germany; its fiercely-adorned, geometrically-arrayed Teutonic raiders were clearly intended as thinly-disguised Nazis. Eisenstein called Alexander Nevsky “a fugue on the theme of patriotism,” and was awarded the Order of Lenin for the work early in 1939. The film was quietly withdrawn from distribution after Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact later that same year. “One of the greatest achievements of Soviet and world cinema ... As magnificent today as it must have been in 1938” (James Monaco). B&W, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 110 mins.