Overlord

Reviewed by Josh Rosenblatt, Fri., April 20, 2007

Overlord

Criterion, $39.95

Stuart Cooper's little-known but influential 1975 movie about the dehumanizing effects of war begins, appropriately enough, with the sound of marching feet and the rumbling of tank engines. From there, it follows a diffident young British soldier named Thomas Beddows (Brian Stirner) from training camp to the D-Day invasion of France in 1944, where he will be among the first to face the German guns. Poor Beddows: He lacks most of the qualities you'd expect in a war-movie hero but is cursed with a premonitory sense of his own death and an almost enlightened awareness of the insignificance of his life in relation to the grand designs of vying nations. "We are part of a machine that grows bigger and bigger," he writes to his parents before embarking on his trip across the English Channel, "while we get smaller and smaller." Overlord is striking in its originality and meditative tone and just cynical enough to acknowledge the beauty that often accompanies the most horrible acts of mass human cruelty. Cooper, who made his name in 1970 with the documentary A Test of Violence (included as part of this disc's supplements), was originally commissioned by the British Imperial War Museum to make a documentary commemorating the 30th anniversary of the D-Day invasion and was given total access to the museum's generous archives of Royal Air Force and British army war footage. When he decided instead to mark the occasion with a narrative film, Cooper decided to keep that footage front and center, splicing historical shots of bombing raids, burning buildings, city evacuations, and aerial combat into Beddows' rather more modest tale of individual resignation and created, in the process, a movie that's both personal and as vast as the war itself. The extras on this disc include a fascinating examination of the work of the British army and air force cameramen (crazy buggers all) who took to the skies and rushed onto beachheads with only their cameras to protect them, and a look at the influence wartime photography had on Cooper's vision of a new and different kind of war movie, a movie one British Imperial War Museum historian hails for turning "something horrendous into something beautiful."

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