Wessex
At War - On Screen
Local-Interest
Film & TV Productions
Overlord
(1975) Director Stuart Cooper,
EMI / Imperial War Museum
In 1975, the UK’s
notorious “30 Year
Rule” whereby official
documents are kept under
wraps until their authors
are safely dead, allowed
key WWII records to be released,
the end of the war having
been 30 years before. The
result was a series of more
realistic treatments in
print and on screen, both
documentary and dramatised
(such as A Bridge Too
Far). One lesser known
film, which won awards on
its release (Silver Bear,
Special Jury Prize, Berlin
Film Fest, plus an Interfilm
award) was Overlord,
directed by Stuart Cooper
and co-produced by the Imperial
War Museum. For many years
it was seen only on rare
TV showings. Then, following
a showing of some clips
in a US cable channel documentary
by John Cassavetes' daughter
Xan, it was screened in
2004 in a restored print,
at the 2004 Telluride Film
Festival, where critic Roger
Ebert praised the 20-year
old film as the most remarkable
discovery of the festival.
In 2008 it was issued on
DVD, first in the US (the
director is American) in
2007 as part of the Criterion
DVD Collection, complete
with commentary and extras,
and then in the UK in 2008,
with a new R2 release announced
for August.
I have to say at the outset
that anyone expecting a
conventional war film will
be disappointed in this
bleak, ultra-realist effort,
and I gather this was the
original idea, to provide
a counterpoint to the conventional
more heroic and spectacular
view of war. The production
approach was an ultra low
budget one of using the
Imperial War Museum’s
vast store of archival footage,
and shooting the connecting
scenes of a young man’s
training in matching style.
(Cinematographer John Alcott,
who worked with Kubrick,
used 1940s lenses and the
film stock was processed
to match.)
The director spent 3 years
trolling through war museum
archive footage, and reportedly
this makes up 27% of the
83 minute total. The criticism
given in the Radio Times
film guide blurb [possibly
written by Barry Norman,
whose father directed Ealing's
1958 Dunkirk] is
that Cooper spent too much
time looking at newsreel
footage and not enough on
the script, which is credited
to the director and Christopher
Hudson, who also created
a novelisation of the script.
(Having worked on the odd
documentary where archival
footage has to be integrated
with newly-filmed material,
I have to add this criticism
is a bit glib - such an
undertaking requires a carefully
researched approach; it’s
a bit like building a bridge,
where both ends have to
meet in the middle.) Cooper
described in a 2008
Guardian article how
the project developed:
I spent approximately 3,000 hours in that dark cell between 1971 and 1975, briefly interrupted by a couple of other projects. It was during the archival research that I developed the idea of a dramatised feature film about an English soldier who sees his first action on D-Day, interweaving the archive footage to expand and tell the story. More research in the museum's document section - reading letters and unpublished diaries of ordinary soldiers who saw action in the first wave of D-Day - refined the concept. ....
A writer, Christopher Hudson, then came aboard to continue the research and co-write the screenplay. What became apparent about the writing process was that until we knew what the film archive would support in narrative form, we could not write the screenplay. In other words, the film archive controlled what historical events our soldier's story would encompass. Once that was established, Hudson was able to dramatise some wonderful and totally original scenes extracted from diaries and letters of real servicemen. .... Overlord is not about military heroics; on the contrary, it is about the bleakness of sacrifice.
The
film is a low-key documentary
drama of the call-up [induction]
and training of a young
Everyman-figure soldier
in 1944, ending with his
embarkation for Operation
Overlord - D-Day. (His name
is Tom – I suppose
‘Tommy’ would’ve
made the reference to ‘Tommy
Atkins’ as the proverbial
everyman British soldier
too obvious.) The film covers
his pre-embarkation training,
from when he says goodbye
to mum and dad and dog in
London, taking a book (David
Copperfield) to read on
the train, arrives late
after missing his train
connection, gets told off
by the senior soldier in
charge of his barracks hut,
and undergoes similar indignities
in the months ahead. (There’s
no tough drill sergeant
character here – Tom
is simply too low in the
hierarchy.) The dialogue
is minimalist – I
think the idea is the young
man cannot really articulate
his mixed feelings of resignation
and disappointment at what
he anticipates will happen
to him.
We see only his worm’s
eye view of the war, which
is as confined as can be.
The tiny cast necessitated
by a budget of under £100K
accentuates the feeling
of isolation - no sense
of masses of young men who
were all in the same situation.
Some of the actuality footage
intercut stretches the concept
somewhat: arguably it represents
scenes he would've seen
in the cinema as newsreel
footage; in fact what Cooper
and the IWM wanted to show
is the sort of footage the
newsreel editors would've
discarded as 'routine.'
Instead, the archive footage
does double duty to show
the wider perspective. The
films opens (after a minute
of wait-for-it blank screen)
with German aerial souvenir-style
footage of captured capital
cities Paris and Rome, with
Hitler beaming down - an
opening perhaps inspired
by Riefenstahl's Nazi-propaganda
documentary work, but not
that effective here. Newly
shot aerial footage from
the last surviving Lanc
[pictured at page top]
of English countryside rolls
on without any apparent
rationale. Apparently this
is on its way over to bomb
Occupied Europe, but this
is not given a narrative
context .
However the intercutting
generally introduces a poetic
quality most documentaries
and dramas miss, aided by
a score by Paul Glass. That
the young man has somehow
acquired a premonition he
will die soon is the basis
of the film’s poignant
lyrical quality. I’m
not really giving away any
plot secret here –
Tom senses he will die,
and accepts this, and the
film is full of foreshadowing
as he repeatedly sees in
his mind’s eye himself
falling on the beach. (This
motif was also used in the
poster, pictured right.)
This starts early on, when
the platoon are on their
landing craft approaching
the Normandy beach (a classic
war-film setup, going back
to Lewis Milestone's
A Walk In The Sun,
1945). There are few flashbacks
representing the protagonist’s
memories of his home life,
in the style of Losey's
King & Country
or Malick's The Thin
Red Line. The juxtaposition
of imagery is at times reminiscent
of a scene in Menzel's 1967
WW2 Czech-resistance tragicomedy
Closely Watched Trains,
when the young protagonist
is being taken away on a
train by the SS to be shot
as a hostage and his glimpses
of passing trackside villages
take on a 'last look' poignancy.
We also get fantasy flash-forward
sequences to do with his
anticipated death, and that
of a German soldier he imagines
he encounters. There's also
a fantasy followup to his
meeting a girl at a dance,
which provides the film's
most original scene, where
sex and death are surreally
combined. The film is ultimately
a tragedy, that of the many
who never got to write their
memoirs or reminisce about
the war for years after,
who saw next to nothing
of actual combat, and didn't
get to live a normal life
either, being among the
thousands of new recruits
who fell on D-Day itself.
The local interest aspect
is that the new scenes were
mainly shot in Dorset, with
Poole and the Kingston Lacy-Corfe
estate credited. Most of
these locations are deliberately
anonymous, but Corfe Castle
is quite recognizable in
its own right, with the
protagonist ascending to
the top of the ruin at the
end of act one [around 25
mins in], a scene revisited
at the end for its obvious
symbolic potential. The
camp he trains at, which
the script only identifies
as somewhere on the South
Coast, is thus presumably
meant to be one of the many
then in the vicinity (though
the IMDB indicates Aldershot
army barracks was used).
The Normandy beach is portrayed
by Studland, which is part
of the same National Trust
estate credited. Studland
Beach was similar enough
to Normandy ones that it
was used in real-life training
exercises watched by Churchill,
Monty and Ike from an ad
hoc blockhouse, Ft Henry
[pictured at page bottom].
