If
you ask people if they’ve heard of or seen a WWII film called Overlord, the response might be
something like ‘oh you mean that Nazi Zombies thing?’ Decades before producer J.J. Abrams reused
the title for his big budget Return to
Castle Wolfenstein flick, there was this little known 1975 Silver Bear
winner of the same name chronicling the tragic odyssey of one young soldier’s sojourn
from boot camp to the shores of Normandy on D-Day.
Written
and directed by Stuart Cooper and exquisitely photographed by Stanley Kubrick’s
longtime cinematographer John Alcott who specifically selected certain film
stocks, cameras and lenses used by the military at the time, this clandestine
Imperial War Museum production remains one of the great largely unseen WWII
films which got lost in the shuffle before Janus Films and The Criterion Collection
rescued it from near total obscurity.
Referring
to ‘Operation Overlord’, codename for the D-Day invasion of Normandy, Overlord is characterized for its deft
mixture of authentic WWII footage with staged footage to create an incomparable,
unforgettably haunting cinematic experience.
Told purely from the perspective of British soldier Tom Beddoes (Brian
Stirner), the film is a dreamy and fleeting interior monologue reflecting the
new recruit’s state of mind as he leaves his tranquil and simplistic home life
behind, undergoes basic training, meets a girl along the way and gets one step
closer each day to the front of the firing line.
Partially
a straightforward narrative and a compendium of never-before seen combat
footage and weaponry tests, Overlord presents
in microcosm the affecting tale lived out by most of the soldiers who would meet
their end on that fateful day. There
have been a number of many films dramatizing D-Day over the years from The Longest Day, Saving Private Ryan to D-Day
The Sixth of June, but few if any get this close to the confused and lost mindset
of one soldier’s experience surrounded by very real physical evidence of the
war in motion.
One
of the keys to the film’s tightrope walk between fantasy and reality is how the
loose voiceover narration from the film’s protagonist Tom Beddoes connects the
cross-cutting between his own imaginings of the past and possible future to the
present gradual crawl towards ground zero.
Take for instance a sequence where Tom meets a young girl and the two
share a kiss, with the film cutting to a surreal image of them standing inside
a D-Day landing craft alone, as though for just a moment the harsh impending realities
of War stop existing for them.
Also
key to expressing Tom’s disorientation is the way the film cross-cuts between
prior interactions with family members and fellow soldiers before abruptly cutting
back to the present inside the landing craft as it inches its way closer to the
shoreline. Occasionally the film does
leave the headspace of the young Tom Beddoes, including a melancholic montage
of military vehicles and personnel traveling towards their drop-off point, with
the soft-spoken vocals of a soldier bemoaning the fact that no one really knows
where this war will take them.
Despite
being granted unprecedented access to archival materials such as flammable
nitrate negatives and journals kept by soldiers in combat, Stuart Cooper’s Overlord failed to secure US theatrical
distribution and against the accolades it garnered only appeared in select
screenings in between occasional television broadcasts. While Cooper’s epic did appear briefly on the
now defunct Z-Channel in the early 1980s, Overlord
finally saw an official release in the US in 2006 thanks to the dedicated
efforts of Janus Films and the Criterion Collection.
Seen
now, it remains an indelible and timeless angle on what it meant to be a young
man thrust into a war he was almost certain he wouldn’t come back alive
from. For all of the resources of cinema
over the years attempting to dramatize D-Day and WWII, only this one managed to
convey with its unique mixture of the imaginary and full-blooded reality the
experience of what so many twenty-somethings like Tom Beddoes went through as
they left their ordinary lives behind to face the inevitable, all-consuming
totality of war. There’s never been a
film quite like Overlord before, one
which the film world is unlikely to happen upon ever again.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki