Overlord (1975)

Very well executed

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

A little seen war-movie by director Stuart Cooper, "Overlord" traces foot-soldier Brian Stirner's journey from enlistment to expiration. Beginning with a premonition of death, we watch as the young man joins the East Yorkshire Regiment, is put through boot camp, falls in love with a local girl, is thrown into a boat, journeys to France and participates in Operation Overlord, the Allied D-Day landings in France. Here he promptly dies.Roughly fifty percent of "Overlord" is comprised of documentary footage. This stock footage is carefully spliced into the film's central story, which is filmed in a similar gritty, faux-documentary style. The film's cinematographer was John Alcott, who worked extensively with Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick himself praised "Overlord", and reportedly told Cooper that the film's only problem was that "it's too short". Despite the film's faux-documentary style, Cooper's overall tone is surreal, dreamy and almost poetic. It's the bridge between Milestone's "A Walk in the Sun", Marton's "The Thin Red Line", Cornell Wilde's "Beach Red" and later "poetic", "ethereal", "reminiscent-heavy" war movies like Malick's "The Thin Red Line".Unfortunately, "Overlord's" documentary footage is more interesting than its central narrative. This footage - urgent and raw - grants us glimpses of the London Blitz, throws us into bomber cockpits, lets us observe aerial dogfights, fleet rallies and witness various beach landings. Some extended pieces of stock footage, seemingly uninterrupted single takes, are spectacular. Consider one scene in which we're thrown into a bomber and positioned to watch as the aircraft lifts off from an airfield in England, crosses the English Channel, races across the coast of France and then proceeds further inland. Not only is France's close proximity to England appreciated with such shots, but the overall tempo of bombing runs and the scale/logistics of combat.Elsewhere the film's supposedly "sad" ending is wholly clichéd, filled with old tropes tired even in the 1930s (see "All Quiet On The Western Front's" famous "butterfly ending"). In other ways the film resembles Kevin Brownlow's "It Happened Here", a groundbreaking 1964 British war film which also extensively used faux-documentary footage. 7.5/10 – For war buffs only. Worth one viewing.

That this film is not better known than all the jingoistic crap that came out of Hollyweed about WWII is nothing short of a crime. Many thanks to TCM and Criterion for making this gem more available. A word of warning to the viewer. There are no huge battle scenes, no stars, no digital effects, no big overblown music, just a simple tale of a soldier inducted into the army prior to D-Day, and the tragic outcome. And I'm not giving anything away. One knows from the first moment what the end will be. Everything about this film is superb. The acting by a cast of unknowns, the realistic script and dialogue, the brilliant cinematography that blends actual documentary footage into the film, the haunting music, etc., ad gloriam. All I can say is that this film affected me far more deeply than the above-mentioned film and it's images will stay with me much longer that anything Spielberg spent millions on to create.

"Overlord" is one of the most disembodied and surreal war movies ever created. It's the story of a soldier, Tom, who joins the British Army, trains, then gets sent to the D-Day Invasion (Operation Overlord) and is promptly shot.What makes the movie remarkable, however, is that it uses stock footage of the war interspersed with original footage, strange and original sound-mixing, and discontinuous editing to trace the soldier's progress of mental states to that moment of clarity right before he dies. Past, present, and future are all collapsed into one moment, and an image that provokes a response earlier has a key relationship with an image that comes later. Death, sexuality, and despair are clumped together as well, creating one of the most artful and poetic works ever made on war--which is important, considering that pseudo-poetic "antiwar" movies are made all the time that often break down into over-indulgent action films. No, this movie shares a lot more with Dziga Vertov's "The Man with a Movie Camera" than "The Sands of Iwo Jima".--PolarisDiB

When I heard that this film consisted of about 1/3 newsreel footage, I was expecting the worst. Stock footage blended with studio footage is something you'd find in an MST3k movie; three people in a car driving quickly away from a giant lizard and then cut to a different film grain shot of an iguana in a lab and then back to the car. Oh no, the Iguana is chasing us.The effect can be jarring, to say the least.But Cooper, so far as I have heard, actually wrote the screenplay for Overlord with the stock footage he was going to use already in mind, tailoring his script so that the footage actually made sense. The movie is shot so that the switch from studio to stock lighting and film quality is barely noticeable. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's seamless--it does take a little while to get used to, but after the first fifteen minutes or so you don't even notice it.And that's a good sign, that you have to "get used to" the picture for a little while before you feel comfortable watching it. That's the sign of originality. This is a brooding and slow-paced war film, but unlike other such films it maintains a certain lightness in spite of its weighty subject and so avoids coming off as ponderous. No viewpoints are shoved in your face. Hard questions are asked, yes, but you're given plenty of time to try and sort them out for yourself.This is a movie you have to be wide awake while watching--it demands your full attention, and if you're not willing to give that up then you're probably not going to enjoy it. Overlord is most certainly not mindless entertainment. It provokes thought, and if thought makes you uncomfortable it's simply not the movie for you.