Joseph Stalin wanted this film to be a propaganda tool to warn Soviet citizens to be wary of German aggression. However, it was rejected at first due to it being "too anti-German", as it came out shortly before the Soviet-German non-aggression pact of 1939 was signed. In 1941, the peace was broken and Stalin reportedly demanded that it be shown in every Soviet movie theater as a rallying cry against the invasion.
The battle on the ice was inspired by Sergei Eisenstein's love for the D.W. Griffith film Way Down East (1920), in which the climax is a chase over a vast river of melting ice heading toward a waterfall.
The actual battle is reflected in both Old Russian and German chronicles, but information about specific details differs. One of the main differences is the number of warriors on the Teutonic side--German chronicles say 300, but Old Russian accounts give the number as 2000. The difference may be because the German accounts only mention the number of Teutonic knights themselves and not their servants, retinues and foot soldiers. Historians are still trying to determine exactly where the battle took place.
Sergei Prokofiev composed the score for the film and re-worked it into the cantata "Aleksandr Nevskiy". In 1995 the music was re-recorded for a VHS and laserdisc release of the film because of the poor quality and bad editing in the original, though the dialogue was left unchanged.
Propaganda 1 Pro-communism/Russia: the call for peasants to rise up and defeat the invaders; the involvement of a woman (Vasilisa) in the army and at the forefront of the struggle; the banishment of the moneyed men (the bourgeoisie) from the town as the peasants arrive; the forgiveness of the Russian people to the foot soldiers of the Teutonic knights (because they were forced to serve the knights).