Alexander Nevsky (1938)

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General		Extras
Category	War	Menu Animation & Audio Notes
Rating
Year Of Production	1938
Running Time	107:40
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Sergei Eisenstein
Studio Distributor	Sovexportfilm Beyond Home Entertainment	Starring	Nikolai Cherkassov N. P. Okhlopkov A.L. Abrikossov V. O. Masalitinova V.S. Ivasheva
Case	Brackley-Trans-No Lip
RPI	$32.95	Music	Sergei Prokofiev

    This time the story starts way back in 1242 when Russia was the whipping boy of the world, subject to invasion by just about any power who dreamt of world domination: well, at least the world as it was known in 1242. Having suffered raids by the Mongol hordes repeatedly, news comes of an impending invasion by the Teutons. The wealthy of the land decide to enter into a pact with the Germans but this does not sit well with the proletarian masses. Enter into the picture one Alexander, now a gentle fisherman but once the revered leader who defeated the Swedes in battle. Upon hearing that the town of Pskov has fallen to the Germans, the masses in the town of Novgorod call upon Alexander to lead them into battle. After meeting a delegation of soldiers from Novgorod, Alexander agrees to lead them in battle, not to save Novgorod but to save Rus (pretty much the current Russia), despite the feeble protestations of the Lord of Novgorod. Naturally Alexander leads his band of predominantly peasants into battle with great success and returns to Novgorod after routing the German army and capturing their leaders. Along the way, we also have a rather amusing sub-plot of two soldiers who are trying to curry the favour of a lovely local girl as far as marriage goes. She decides to choose to marry the one who displays the greatest valour in the upcoming battle. A little twist in the end sees her having the choice made for her by one of the soldiers in favour of the other, since he happens to have taken a fancy to a warrior who fought well in the battle.

    It has to be understood that this was made during the early part of the repressive years of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and clearly Sergei Eisenstein had to work very closely with what the government wanted to see in film. Accordingly, this really smacks of blatant propaganda at times with a whole horde of clichés to contend with - the Soviet woman fighting alongside her male comrades, the Soviet masses rising up in opposition to the wealthy few, the under-trained and under-equipped Soviet army overcoming overwhelming odds to secure a glorious victory, and so on and so forth. Still, if you can accept these obvious propaganda clichés, there is much to enjoy here.

    Obviously Nikolai Cherkassov was a great talent in Soviet film of the era as he gets plenty of exposure in the work of Sergei Eisenstein, and for good reason. He has a commanding presence on-screen that, like the previous films in this little series of Russian films, pervades the entire film. He is the focal point and we certainly cannot forget it. He gets decent support from the rest of the cast although their abilities are not in the same league in general. Vera Ivashova for instance really does not carry off the role of the coy young lady too well at all, but in many respects that is part of the charm of this film. What really stands out here though is the magnificent vistas that Eisenstein tried to bring to the screen: just look at the setting of Novgorod for instance and you will see what I mean. This is not a film shot in some little pokey studio somewhere - this is outdoors in real-life vistas. In that regard Eisenstein's films make a very interesting comparison with, for instance, the quite cozy, intimate surroundings favoured by Alfred Hitchcock in his contemporaneous films. And, just as Hitchcock favoured small intimate casts, Eisenstein does not let us down with his almost signature crowds: once again he has assembled an army of real size and scope to fill out the vistas that he creates. Indeed in many respects this film is closer to something of the ilk of Dances With Wolves in scope rather than the films of his English contemporary.

    Once you get past the propaganda, this is actually quite a pleasurable romp through very early Russian history and there is much to enjoy here. Rated quite highly by the voters on the Internet Movie Database, I fully understand why and this is probably the best of the films of Sergei Eisenstein that I have seen, barring Bronenosets Potyomkin. This is well worth the effort of a viewing, even with the inherent problems with the transfer. Of interest though is the fact that this has a G rating - whilst acknowledging that despite all the killing going on there is no actual blood in sight, nor any actual wounds, I am a little surprised that the strong hints of the tossing of children into a burning fire did not attract a higher rating.

Video

    The transfer is presented in a full frame format.

    The first surprise for me here was that the transfer does not suffer much in the way of inconsistency in the visual aspect of the transfer. This is generally quite sharp and well detailed, with barely a glimpse of any softness or murkiness in the transfer. The second surprise was that the transfer has a quite bright tone to it and a better than respectable clarity as well. Detail is generally quite good, and this really helps those wide-open vistas that Sergei was trying to let us see. Shadow detail is not especially great, but that is to be expected in a film of this vintage. There does not appear to be any low level noise problems with the transfer.

    Whilst it would be lying to suggest that the film has a gorgeous depth to the black and white tones, this is nonetheless a nice looking transfer with some rather nice definition to the grey tones. They come up looking quite well and there is very little problem with delineation of the grey tones at all. This is partly aided by the bright tone of the transfer, which really prevents anything descending too far into the depths of murkiness and indistinction.

    There did not appear to be any significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer. There did not appear to be any significant film-to-video artefacts in the transfer. As usual, the problem in this transfer is the film artefacts and whilst quite significant chunks of the film are surprisingly clear of artefacts, others are positively riddled with them - in particular there are some rather gross scratches and other unsightly blemishes here. Overall, though, I would have to say that the artefacts were far less intrusive than I expected, and they were ultimately only minimally disruptive to the enjoyment of the film.

    It would seem that the film has been subjected to some restoration of sorts as the opening credits are distinctly cleaner than the rest of the film. As is usual for these films, the English subtitles are not selectable, but rather are burned into the picture. Compounding this however is the fact that the subtitles are again in white lettering which is difficult at times to read against the light background of the film. The subtitles were apparently done in 1982 by the Soviets, and a pretty funny lot they are too. Very antiquated in their phrasing, they border on being Russlish as opposed to English. They add a quite unintentional comedic scope to the film.

Audio

    There is just the one audio track on the DVD, a Russian Dolby Digital 2.0 mono soundtrack. You should note that the track is flagged as an English track but it is definitely Russian. Again, I would not be surprised to discover that this is the very original sound recording for the film, as it is again a quite muffled effort. Another poor example of a mono soundtrack. It is a very constricted sounding effort and suffers noticeably from mild distortion and drop-outs virtually throughout. At times, it was a little difficult to listen to the dialogue. There did not seem to be any significant problems with audio sync.

    Like Ivan Groznyj I and Ivan Groznyj II, the musical score comes from Sergei Prokofiev. The result is something of a quasi-operatic style at times, which would suggest to me that this is either derived from, or was the basis for, his rather wonderful cantata of the same name (of course, it may well be the same piece too). The audio really does not help the music at all here and you really miss out on an awful lot of the detail in the score: had the soundtrack been a lot better, this score would have positively shone, as there sounds as if there is some quite wonderful singing here.

    To be honest I have heard better sounding stuff from an over-stretched cassette tape. The vocal track is very recessed in the mix and quite frontal, and this sounds as if it is coming from a sound source about ten metres behind the video source. The reality is that this is coming at you straight from the centre speaker with nothing from any other channel, and the overall constriction in the sound is what gives this the poor co-ordination of the audio and visual experiences. Toss in the mild distortion and this really is something decidedly unspectacular indeed. Whilst I am not asking for nor expecting a full 5.1 digital remastering, I would have thought that a cleaning up of this constricted effort would not have been asking too much. As a note for those who enjoy foley work - you will hear some pretty poor efforts here, especially with the sound of horses hooves.

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Notes

    A reasonably decent video transfer.

    A poor audio transfer.

    An uninspiring extras package.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall