One Way Ticket To Ride

Overlord

Directed by Stuart Cooper(1975)

Mixes archival footage of World War 2, with fictional story of a young man getting ready to go off to war. The archival footage, serves as the young man's thoughts and fears about going into battle. Scenes of air raids and bombings are spliced together with the scenes of sitting on the bus, being polite, and just doing normal everything thingsThe film ends with D-Day, where our hero is among the first to storm the beach, the point where fact and fiction finally meet. Strange, and bizarre military weapons you have never seen before(the rocket wheel???), the barbed wire removing vehicle, appear throughout as well as amazing ariel footage. The most unique and effective "war" film ever seen. Like Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence At Owel Creek", for the WW2 generation. It really puts you in the place, not of a soldier, per say, but of a human bieng, undergoing the process of becoming a soldier, facing the dread, anxiousness, and absurdity, with a solumn dignity, "Im not freightened", he writes to his parents, admitting he is almost certain he is not comming back. Overlord cannot easily be place as either a pro or anti-war film. Thesituation of a gentle, very boyish, nice guy being sent off to theworlds most violent and dangerous conflict in all it's history (hetakes a copy of "David Copperfield" with him, so he will have somethingto read.), is absurd, but it's not handled for irony. There is a scene,where two soldiers are off for R&R and they stumble across a theater,where a young girl is being forced to sing, by her mother in practicefor some kind of competition. When the soldiers enter, the motherdemands she sing again, though the daughter is even more shaken by theunexpected audience. She sings, and about halfway through the soldierswalk off, in disgust or discomfort, the mother still begging them tostay and listen.

Do the soldiers want to fight? No more than this girl, wants to sing,but for mother and mother country, they both do their share. The reason to watch this film, is because it contains none of the usual images and ideas we come to expect from war and anti-war films. Englad took atremendous beating during World War 2, for years sending their sons to stem,the rising tide of Nazism, inching ever further across the sea between them. Overlord, is thus not the story of heroic victory, or the horrors of war, it's the story of the guy who got sent out, the dayafter he made a date(from his level of excitement, maybe his first), and who will probably not be making it back...