Overlord 1975 DvdRip Avi Lee1001

Overlord 1975 DvdRip Avi English Subs Lee1001



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073502/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlord_(film)

The New York Times:

“Overlord,” a prize-winning entry in the 1975 Berlin Film Festival, is only now receiving an American theatrical release. Whatever the reasons for the delay, the film, directed by Stuart Cooper and produced with the cooperation of the Imperial War Museum in Britain, deserves to join the pantheon of essential World War II combat movies. Unlike most Hollywood war movies, it has “action” sequences almost entirely drawn from archival documentaries — German as well as British — which contribute not only to the picture’s realism but also to its dreamlike, almost surreal atmosphere.



Shot in faded black and white by John Alcott, who was also Stanley Kubrick’s cinematographer at the time, the fictional parts of “Overlord” often look like extensions of the documentary sections, which make up about a quarter of the running time. The story is a simple one. A young man named Tom Beddows (Brian Stirner) leaves his parents and his beloved cocker spaniel and reports for military duty, arriving late because of a German air raid. We follow him through his training, his brief moments of liberty and the tedium of waiting for combat, until finally he hunkers down in a boat for the trip across the channel.



Tom’s tale is sparely told, and his middle-class English diffidence keeps him at something of a distance. He gets along well enough with the other soldiers and has a brief, aching romantic interlude with a girl he meets at a dance. He is stoic and a bit fatalistic, accepting the likelihood of his death without evident anguish, and writing a consoling letter to his parents to be delivered instead of the official military notice.



Like its hero, who is brave without a trace of bravado, “Overlord” is unusually quiet and thoughtful. The scale and ambition of combat movies has usually been epic, but this one is disarmingly lyrical and subjective. At times, the documentary passages — aerial tours of France, one from a German reconnaissance plane, another from an Allied bomber; buildings ablaze in the aftermath of bombings; troop trains loading and unloading — seem to take place within Tom’s mind, as he tries to conjure an image of the large historical experience in which his own individual fate plays a small part.



He seems prepared not only to die, but also to be forgotten, a destiny from which the makers of this remarkable film, itself nearly consigned to oblivion, do their best to rescue him.

The Movie has a lovely reminiscent feel for its period and the deceptively peaceful at-home backdrop to the war in the buildup phase to the Allied invasion of the Continent, with bombers taking off from the green fields of England, convoys of invasion troops crossing silent villages and, as a foretaste of deadlier things to come, rarely seen footage of dummy run rehearsals conducted along the coasts of Britain, eerily dramatic when glimpsed in hindsight on later events.



Roger Ebert-1 June 2006.

I wrote from the 2004 Telluride Film Festival:

The most remarkable discovery at this year's Telluride is "Overlord," an elegiac 1975 film that follows the journey of one young British soldier to the beaches of Normandy. The film, directed by Stuart Cooper, won the Silver Bear at Berlin -- but sank quickly from view after a limited release, and was all but forgotten until this Telluride revival.

Unlike "Saving Private Ryan" and other dramatizations based on D-Day, "Overlord" is an intimate film, one that focuses closely on Tom Beddoes (Brian Stirner), who enters the British army, goes through basic training and is one of the first ashore on D-Day. Beddoes is not a macho hero but a quiet, nice boy, who worries about his cocker spaniel and takes along David Copperfield when he goes off to war.

The movie tells his story through a remarkable combination of new and archival footage. It was produced by the Imperial War Museum in London, where Cooper spent three years looking at documentary and newsreel footage from World War II. About 27 percent of the film is archival, and awesomely real -- for example a scene where soldiers and their landing boat are thrown against rocks by furious waves.

There are sights I had never seen before, including monstrous mechanical wheels that propel themselves across the beach to explode land mines and flatten barbed wire. One of these machines is driven by a ring of rockets around its rim, and as it rolls forward, belching fire and smoke, it looks like a creature of hell.



"Overlord," whose title comes from the code word for one of the invasion plans, uses archival footage to show the devastation of bombing raids, from above and below. Cooper's cinematographer, the Kubrick favorite John Alcott, used lenses and film stock that matched the texture of this footage, so the black and white film seems all of a piece. Tom's story is not extraordinary; he says goodbye to his parents, survives some hazing during basic training, makes a few close friends and becomes convinced he will die in the landing. This prospect does not terrify him, and he writes a letter to his parents, consoling them in advance.

He meets a local girl (Julie Neesam) at a dance, in a club filled with soldiers on leave. All of the cliches of such scenes are abandoned. She is a nice girl, he is a nice boy, they are kind to each other, tender and polite, and agree to meet again on Monday. But on Monday, he is part of the early stages of the invasion, which seems, he writes his parents, like an entity that is growing to unimaginable proportions while he becomes a smaller and smaller speck of it. He has a fantasy in which he meets the girl again; to describe it would reveal too much about this film, which is a rare rediscovery.

I reprint this earlier report because I'm writing this from Cannes, and was not able to see the film again before deadline. "Overlord" remains firmly and clearly in my memory as a different kind of war film, one that sees through the eyes of one soldier, and follows his story not through exciting adventures but through the routine steps designed to deliver an efficient and useful warrior to a place where he is needed.

The poignancy in the film comes because he knows, and his parents know, and the girl he meets knows, that his future is on hold. He may return home, he may have a future with the girl, and then again, maybe not, and this is the reality they all acknowledge in one sense or another.



The movie has been restored in a new 35mm print and will have its U.S. theatrical premiere starting Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Silver in Silver Springs, Md. Bookings are set in New York, San Francisco and Seattle, with other cities to follow. "Overlord" combines its newsreel and fictional footage so effectively that it has a greater impact than all fiction, or all documentary, could have achieved. I still remember the rocket-driven mechanical wheel I wrote about from Telluride. I do not recall ever having seen such a machine depicted in a movie; that it is real is awesome.



A film that slipped through the cracks.



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