Alexander Nevsky

Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) was his first completed sound film, and it brought the great Soviet director back into favour after years in the wilderness. It was made as the threat from Nazi Germany grew, and its story of a medieval Russian prince driving back Teutonic invaders was unmistakable wartime allegory, sanctioned at the highest levels of the Stalinist state.

Nikolai Cherkasov plays Nevsky with statuesque grandeur, but the film is remembered for its craft: the celebrated Battle on the Ice, a vast set piece of clashing armies on a frozen lake, and Eisenstein's pioneering fusion of image with Sergei Prokofiev's thunderous score. Director and composer worked so closely together that the result became a founding study of how music and montage can drive one another. Eisenstein's own writings on the sequence, which analyse how visual rhythm and music interlock, are still required reading in film schools today.

The film was briefly suppressed when the Nazi-Soviet pact made its subject inconvenient, and then triumphantly reissued once Germany invaded the Soviet Union, when it became a rallying cry. Its way of staging battle on screen can be traced from Olivier's Henry V through countless epics since, and the cantata Prokofiev drew from the score is a staple of concert halls worldwide. Monumental and stirring, and formally brilliant, it is the most accessible film Eisenstein made and one of the great historical spectacles of the sound era.