However, the real achievement of Overlord is not so much the ability of Cooper and his editor, Jonathan Gili, to match the archival footage with the new footage by cinematographer John Alcott, who that same year shot Stanley Kubrick’s lush tragedy Barry Lyndon. Rather, it is Cooper’s ability to intermingle the two sources of imagery to create a persistently dreamlike atmosphere; despite having completely different sources, the film’s documentary footage and expressive fictional footage are all of a piece—both realistic and surreal. Overlord is replete with the traditions of the war genre, from the training montage, to the homosocial camaraderie of the troops, but its most powerful moments take place deep within the young soldier’s dreamworld, where he imagines conversations and encounters that haunt the build-up to the Allied invasion, giving this massive, historical moment an everyman emotional charge.

The young man is named Tom, and he is played by Brian Stirner, who at the time was an unknown (Cooper insisted that the main character not be played by a recognizable actor). He is a simple and modest person, perched (as are so many soldiers) on the threshold between boyhood and manhood. He has an inviting face and a genial persona, which immediately sets up the fear that we are watching the slow destruction of innocence. There are hints of his possible death in a recurring slow-motion image of a soldier in full sprint being shot down, but it is not clear exactly who this victim is and whether it is a premonition of the future of a symbol of the necessary evils of war.

Because Overlord was made partially to celebrate the 30th anniversary of D-Day, it is not a one-note antiwar missive, but neither it is a rah-rah celebration of military prowess. Instead, Cooper suggests the realities of war without making any overt moral statements. His use of the archival footage is particularly compelling here because it evokes such contrasting emotions. Images of bombs dropping from the bellies of planes have an almost poetic rhythm, a montage of military/industrial build-up can’t help but create a sense of both admiration and dread, and the first-person shots of planes shooting up supply-carrying trains gives you a vertiginous video-game rush that is countered by on-the-ground footage of burning buildings and the occasional, brief shot of charred German corpses. It is both exhilarating and nauseating, and the fact that Cooper and his co-screenwriter Christopher Hudson derived much of their screenplay from actual journal entries reinforces the idea that such divergent responses are not at all uncommon.

The emotional thread of the story is drawn out in a romantic subplot in which Tom meets a young woman (Julie Neesam) at a dance in the small town where his unit is stationed. They have a sweet, slightly awkward exchange at the dance and then go for a chaste walk in which they both suggest more attraction than they’re willing to engage at that moment. They promise to meet again, but then Tom’s unit is called out, which ensures that any future exchanges will take place only inside the young man’s mind. Cooper gives us two scenes in which Tom and the girl reunite in the realm of his daydreams, which creates a sensation of such universal loss and sadness that the unexpected and cruelly ironic conclusion on the sands of Normandy takes on a heightened sense of tragedy.

Although Overlord shared the Silver Bear at the 1975 Berlin Film Festival, it quickly sank from memory when it failed to get a U.S. distributor and was all but forgotten until it was resurrected at the 2006 Telluride Film Festival. I doubt it will be forgotten again.

Copyright ©2007 James Kendrick

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