Film
Overlord, PG, 85 min. Shows Sept. 1-5 at the Belcourt
Having Stuart Cooper’s World War II meditation Overlord show up in theaters right now, some 30 years after it was made, is like skipping back in time twice. Overlord did fairly well on the festival circuit in 1975 (even winning the Silver Bear at Berlin), but before now its only significant exposure in the United States had come on Los Angeles’ defunct cable station Z Channel, which made Overlord a cult item through frequent airings in the late ’70s. Thanks to the 2004 documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, a new generation of cineastes found out about Cooper’s strange, arty war film, which weaves startling stock footage into the story of one British recruit’s journey to a D-Day death. People clamored to see it, so here it is: a lost artifact of ’70s art-cinema, to file between Stanley Kubrick, Ken Russell and Terrence Malick.
The second time-skip comes courtesy of the stock footage, which shows how war really looked in Europe in the ’40s. The clips Cooper chooses are so packed with destruction—some of it oddly beautiful—that it’s almost too alien to connect with. What rings more familiar are the scenes of the hero, Tom Beddows (played by Brian Stirner, a sort of proto-Richard E. Grant), as he goes through training and hangs around the base. Beddows chats with the lads, heads into town and meets a girl. Outside of the occasional profanity and the sense of impending doom, his story could’ve been excerpted from one of Michael Powell’s or Carol Reed’s patriotic World War II melodramas.
Cooper reportedly spent three years poring over the archives at London’s Imperial War Museum to find the most compelling bits of film; he then constructed a narrative around them. But that narrative isn’t an afterthought. As shot by Kubrick’s preferred ’70s cinematographer John Alcott, who filmed Barry Lyndon the same year, Overlord’s original scenes have a lyrical quality, enhanced by high-contrast black-and-white imagery and a frequent use of shallow depth-of-field. The characters look like blobs of ink, dripping across the scarred countryside. And while Cooper never pretends that Beddows’ life amounts to anything more than one long march to a shallow Normandy grave, neither does he give in to easy irony. Overlord is more about the vast gulf between Beddows’ pre-D-Day existence—spent reading Dickens and puttering around—and the massive military machine that’s about to grind him up.
Cooper makes masterful use of the stock footage, which is edited seamlessly into the main story. There’s some truly astonishing material here: bombed-out buildings that look like abstract sculpture, bizarre experimental weapons that look like gadgets of the future, and fighter-plane strafing runs that look like harbingers of the end times. Even mundane shots of men hanging around the base have a reality that would be hard to construct on a set.
All of it serves as a kind of Greek chorus behind Beddows’ increasing anxiety, and his fantasies about death and martyrdom. Overlord is impressionistic to the point of abstraction at times, but Cooper does what he aims to do, putting the viewer inside Beddows’ head as he waits interminably for moments of unimaginable violence. The whole movie plays like a nightmare—a furious variation on the “taking a test you haven’t prepared for” dream—right up to the brilliantly conceived subjective shots of Beddows’ actual demise. It’s a moment that Cooper has prepared us for with all his shots from inside gunner turrets and fighter cockpits. In war, fate has a way of casting a shadow as big as a bomber.
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