Be Excellent To Each Other

'Do you like it'
'What?'
'Being a soldier.'
'Not much, no.'

Tom Beddows, like every other young man, has to join the army. In 'Overlord', we follow him through basic training through to deployment on D-Day. We also watch him grow and change as he turns from civilian into active soldier. However, although we briefly meet his parents and dog, we don't really know much about his previous life, although his accent suggests he is from a more respectable background than some of his comrades. Beddows is the Everyman: he represents the men who were to land on the beach.

I'm not saying we don't learn much about him at all: there are several key moments, such as with 'The Girl' or when he is writing home, which are touching and human, and show that he is not just a dramatic device to illustrate what these men went through. But, along with the two other soldiers who we spend most of the film with - one a Lancashire (I think, not good on accents) lad who clearly has had many experiences in his pre-army life, and the other a gruff veteran of four years' service - they don't disclose much. Yet, at the same time, they come across as real people: but for the grace of God we could have met them in those circumstances too. However, Beddows, Jack, and Arthur are the only named characters in the film: everyone else is just a mass of uniformed cogs in a giant machine.

The film mixes fiction with fact, with heavy use of archive footage to illustrate not only the training and the build-up to D-Day, but also the passing of time. It also intermingles it during the numerous dream sequences when we see what is going on inside Beddow's mind. Surprisingly, the mixing of the clips work, although as ever I am slightly uncomfortable with seeing the real cost of war in a fictional setting, but then perhaps such things must be shown.

I'm normally sceptical of dream sequences in films - I'd much rather everything that happens in a fictional world to happen within it, as if it could have been caught on film had it actually occurred. Yet it really adds to the atmosphere of the film, especially adding to the sense of foreboding which Beddows has but doesn't discuss. Naturally, when he meets who the credits just call 'The Girl', she tends to take prominence, and I would be surprised if people are unmoved by her later 'appearances' after they part. There's one sequence where she shows him 'how they lay out the dead': it's surprisingly touching, moving, and disturbing at the same time.

For me, the most moving part of the film comes just before D-Day. The men are ordered to burn all private possessions, and we watch Beddows calmly throw letters and photographs from his family onto the fire. As he himself says, there's nothing left after that. He has become the soldier, and his past life does not matter: it is the future, and his participation in the operation, which matters now.

This is an excellent film. It give us an insight into the experiences of a generation, which will soon disappear. Moreover, whilst we witness him changing throughout his time in the army, by giving us access to his mind we feel we know what moves him, and it makes the end even more powerful. Yet, at the same time, throughout the film the viewer has little choice but to place themselves in Beddows' shoes: it could, after all, have been us. A gem.


(As a side note, growing up in Cornwall we were often made aware that much of the pre-D-Day preparations and training exercises took place off the Cornish coast. I am pretty sure I recognised at least one stretch of beach during what I think might have archive footage of sea training)

Good write up, K. I may give this a watch

Good write up there, Kern. I've not seen this but I'd like to give it a go. From what you say it sounds like a mix of the school of Lindsey Anderson ('If...') and Richardson and Sillitoe ('Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner'.) Therefore I am interested, and I do love a good dream sequence or surreal misce en scene if it fits naturally.

There were many great films made during the war that shared the mythic feel of a nation at the centre of cataclysmic events. Look to the GPO Film Unit and Crown Film Unit and its output, with Cavalcanti and Jennings, and the fantasy-realism films of Powell & Pressburger. After the war, some rather disappointing faux-mythologising films appeared. Like the aforementioned films these tried to include people of all backgrounds, but fell too easily into stereotypes and had a banal lack of urgency, as if everyone knew everything would turn out right in the end. Possibly the worst case of this sort of film is 'Dunkirk', which had a hell of a lot of talent thrown at it to little effect. John Mills, a sterling actor with tremendous range, found himself in a living hell of stiff-upper-lip archetypes of all classes in pretty much the same boy's own plots again and again. Only the excellent 'Cruel Sea' with Jack Hawkins really escaped the 1950's trap. It's easy to see how it turned out to be like this, after a gruelling six year war and in austerity Britain, people were already clamouring for a nostalgic escapism to events barely past. Unlike other countries such as the axis powers as Russia which were universally scarred by war, those with trauma in the US and Britain were relatively few, and appetite was strong for the creation of a national self-image beyond natural memory to sustain a nation mired in the loss of empire and a dsillusioning cold war.

Then came 'the angry young men' and the Osbourne revolution. Despite his ironically-with-hindsight crap writing skills, he did change cinema. The best film-makers dealt with the current young generation and the fight against hidebound authority. It is strange that more did not look back to their father's fight and write a new history through their eyes of the young caught in events beyond their control and being knuckled under by authority - this time military. But then, perhaps not. After all, the father's cry of "we fought a war for you lot," was probably enough to put many of them off, and the style of cinema was very much the internal, introverted neo-realism pioneered by Italian film and the plays of Shelagh Delaney and Osbourne, rather than the grand canvas of old. 'The Great Escape' was for the older generation, 'The Hill' with a young, brooding, vicious Sean Connery was for the new.

So it sounds to me as if Overlord is happily a rare gem where both styles collide, and as such I shall Seek it out. Even though I'm probably entirely wrong.

Anyway, great write-up Kern, if I find it I shall let you know what I think.

Thanks!

What most surprised me was the age of the film. Watching it, I was convinced it was from the late 1940s or early 1950s, given the nature of the black and white images but IMDB never lies. Wow.

There's a Soviet one about a soldier on furlough that I've heard is equally moving, but its name escapes me at the moment.