Overlord (Stuart Cooper, 1975) 2
on 35mm at the Balboa Theater, with Ben and Sunny. 9 October, 2006, at 21:15.
I wish that I hadn’t read anything about the film before seeing it. It was too hard to resist trying to discern which shots were archival and which ones contemporary, and I can’t imagine the effect the film would have had on me had I not known that any of it was archival. That said, there were very few sequences that were at all difficult to tell apart.
The film consisted of several very engaging scenes (the main actor, Brian Stirner, was excellent), several very dull scenes, and lots of incredible archival footage (as far as I can recall, it’s the first time I’ve seen extensive archival footage from WWII on 35mm). Unfortunately, the archival footage and the contemporary scenes felt very poorly stitched together, and combined with the fairly dull scenes (Tom’s fantasies of meeting the girl), the film continually felt like it was falling apart. At the same time, the archival footage certainly helped underscore Tom’s thoughts on being a tiny part of this tremendous war machinery, as well as his own complete insigificance. We come to know very little of Tom through the film—he has parents, and a dog—yet it seems appropriate, since he himself feels so detached from his former self, his new self having no real value or meaning.
Overlord is a unique film, and for that reason alone, I’m glad I watched it. In some ways it felt like an exercise, in other ways it felt like a heavy-handed attempt to illustrate some fairly abstract ideas. Yet at the same time, so much care was put into the film, and I so enjoyed a good number of the scenes that the film left me with a good feeling overall. Also, I’ve never seen another film so effectively portray the insignficance of an individual soldier from a soldier’s perspective, that I feel the film should be considered notable. Considering that there are so few war films that I admire, it wouldn’t be hard for me to recommend this as one of them.
(**)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943) 2
on DVD at home with Lucía. 19 September, in the evening.
I enjoyed this film while I was watching it, but when I discovered immediately afterward that it was made in 1943 and not after the war, I realized how remarkable it is, and how sharp it must have seemed at the time. Still, for me, the pinnacle of the Powell/Pressburger joint career was Peeping Tom.
(**)