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Overlord
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| Year: |
1975
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Director: |
Stuart Cooper
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| Stars: |
Brian Stirner, Davyd Harries, Nicholas Ball, Julie Neesam, Sam Sewell, John Franklyn-Robbins, Stella Tanner, Harry Shacklock, David Scheuer, Ian Liston, Lorna Lewis, Stephen Riddle, Jack Le White, Mark Penfold, Micaela Minelli, Elsa Minelli
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| Genre: |
War |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
The end of the war in Europe approaches, and as it does the need for more conscripts is greater than ever. One eighteen-year-old called up to fight for his country is Thomas Beddows (Brian Stirner), and he has mixed feelings about joining the army as he would have preferred to stay at home with his parents and pet dog, who today he is bidding farewell to, perhaps for the final time. He misses the train to his new camp, and therefore arrives late, but is soon brought into line by the regime there - but what of his premonitions? Premonitions of death...
Overlord had a curious history. Made with the assistance of the British Imperial War Museum, around a third of it consisted of stock footage from their extensive library, with the surrounding, fictional story shot in black and white to match it. You can see the joins, but overall for a low budget film this was an impressive acheivement on a purely technical level. At the time, the film was given a tiny release, though it did win the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, but what happened decades later nobody could have predicted.
What that was was a second wind when Overlord played at a few festivals about thirty years later to great acclaim, and its DVD release did much to spread the word that director Stuart Cooper, an American in Britain, had come up with something special; in some quarters it was labelled a neglected classic. While that may be overstating the case, the film certainly offered up something different to the usual war dramas, being more experimental in nature with "dream sequences", for want of a better phrase, to show us what is passing through the mind of Thomas.
Curiously, though, this does not bring us closer to the character emotionally, as it could be his slightly stuffy, restrained personality or the director's handling that makes him appear so distant, but you never get the feeling he is anything more than a representation of the typical British soldier in World War II. This means there are few surprises in store, with most of the interest held in a somewhat dispassionate view of the conflict, realised with that footage which frequently can be enthralling, whether it's bombing raids, destroyed buildings or even simple training exercises.
Cooper adds sound effects to these clips to bring them to life and make them come across as part of the bigger picture, and in a way you wonder if he might not have been better creating a documentary from what he had access to, but Thomas's life, which ends much as we, and he for that matter, expects, does work up a measure of poignancy. He banters with fellow recruit Arthur (Nicholas Ball), meets a girl (Julie Neesam) at a dance with whom he has no future but sees in her an alternative existence, and writes home to his parents that he's sure he will never set eyes on them again, a letter which is eventually burned before he has the chance to send it. Overlord, which climaxes with the D-Day landings, may leave the viewer at a remove from the events it depicts through its insistence on concentrating on one soldier, but it's never less than captivating. Music by Paul Glass.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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