Overlord

Stuart Cooper's 1975, WWII film Overlord follows boyish new recruit Tom Beddoes (Brian Stirner) from the beginnings of his army career to his first taste of war in the Normandy landings. We watch him navigate basic training and his first awkward dalliances with the opposite sex, as he’s shunted around British army facilities designed to prepare him for battle. The film is perhaps most notable for its unusual construction – Cooper, along with Barry Lyndon cinematographer John Alcott, used antique German lenses to capture grainy black and white footage that they then blended with wartime documentary material found in the archive of London's Imperial War Museum.

We’re presented with aerial footage of real bombs exploding, firefighters tackling Blitz blazes, and actual wartime casualties, which Cooper cuts with newly shot soft-focus, doom-laden dream sequences as our protagonist slowly becomes convinced of his impending demise. The effect can occasionally be jarring, but it allows the viewer a glimpse of both the inner life of the soldier waiting for combat, and the literal reality of the most devastating war the world has ever seen. “The war machine keeps growing, and I am getting smaller and smaller,” Beddoes muses in a letter to his parents. Often war films will present combatants as either noble heroes with agency, or as anonymous cannon fodder fighting somebody else's battle. In depicting Tom Beddoes as a man resigned to death, but committed to facing it as an individual, with thought and dignity, Overlord finds a truth somewhere in between.

Extras

Discs don't come much more loaded than this. There’s a commentary by Cooper and Stirner, two featurettes and a couple of 1940s propaganda pieces. Also included are Coopers' prize winning short film A Test of Violence and an essay from one of the best critics in the business, Kent Jones.