Alexander Nevsky (1938)

Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky was spawned by world events, kept out of circulation due to changing political winds, and then enshrined as perhaps the most influential Soviet-made historical film. Made at the behest of the Soviet government to bolster morale, the film re-enacted a 13th century Russian victory over invading Teutonic knights. Intended to remind the Russian people that they'd defeated supposedly superior German invaders before, the movie proved astoundingly effective as anti-Hitler propaganda within the Soviet Union, and it was also popular around the world, named one of the best films of the year by the very conservative National Board of Review, among others. Then Hitler and Stalin signed their non-aggression pact in 1939, and the movie was withdrawn from circulation, no longer of use to the Soviet government. With the breakdown of the "peace" between the two nations in 1941, Alexander Nevsky was rushed back into release in the Soviet Union, where it proved even more effective the second time around. It had by that time already influenced the work of filmmakers far from the Soviet Union: it was clearly the motivation for the depiction of England's defeat of the Spanish Armada in Alexander Korda's The Lion Has Wings (1940), the first British propaganda film of the war, started the day after Hitler invaded Poland; and Laurence Olivier modeled most of the Battle of Agincourt in his Henry V (1944) after the battle scenes in Alexander Nevsky, virtually recreating entire shots in what proved the first successful film of a Shakespeare play. The movie's ongoing influence extended to the concert hall: composer Sergei Prokofiev wrote a score inspired by the film that he later reshaped into a massive choral/orchestral piece that took on a life of its own in the concert hall, arguably the piece of film music that most successfully made the leap into the orchestral repertory. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide