East Bay Premiere!

Overlord may be the most real, and also the most inventive, film yet made on World War II. It artfully weaves unbelievable wartime actualities (gleaned from negatives at the Imperial War Museum)-fighting fires as London comes crashing down; bizarre machines that seek and eat landmines; soldiers being thrown against the rocks by violent waves-with an intimate, moving, and totally believable fiction. The 1975 film by Stuart Cooper took the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, then quietly retreated into obscurity, much like its hero. Tom (Brian Stirner) is a decent lad who says a quiet goodbye to his parents and goes off to war carrying David Copperfield and no illusions about his fate. As Tom trains and waits for “our bit of the war to start”-the D-Day beach invasion, code name “Overlord”-his imagination links him to the larger war. Working with the cinematographer John Alcott (best known for his work with Stanley Kubrick), using cameras from the forties, Cooper created an insider's view of WWII, the complex weave of dream and reality that was the grunt's experience of the “good war.”