#stuart cooper

The Saint: The Death Game (5.17, ITC, 1967)

"You see, some people do not take kindly to the pressures I exert. Naturally, I have to enforce this by having them executed - preferably in such a way that it appears to be an accident. I should like to consider you two ideal candidates for my pressure department. Your starting salaries will be seventy-five thousand dollars a year."

OVERLORD ('75) by Greg Ferrara

Directed by Stuart Cooper, OVERLORD is a brilliantly expressionistic meditation on the machinations of war. It is the story of Tom (Brian Stirner), a soldier who has been called to duty to fight in World War II. As the title suggests, he takes part in the D-Day landings (codenamed Operation Overlord), but the film is not about battle or military strategy. It is about being one small part of a giant machine. In the overall war machine, the soldiers are nothing more than ball bearings. Important, yes, but easily substituted and changed out when necessary.

Cooper doesn't give us a plot so much as a series of moments involving Tom. Interspersed with Tom's moments are real footage from training films shot during the War. This footage of fantastic machines and men being battered about and knocked around on the beaches pops in and out of the film, like fleeting glimpses of Tom's memory popping in and out of his head. But Tom also sees himself—in a war he has not yet joined—either as a premonition or fantasy. As often as not, his premonitions of himself are blurred.

Cooper worked with cinematographer John Alcott, the Oscar winning photographer of BARRY LYNDON (’75). Together, they create an eerie atmosphere of both anticipation and dread, feelings that Tom cannot shake, even more so when he laments to a newfound lover that he may never see her again.

He sees her in premonitions too, as if she is with him in the war, stuck in the middle of the machine.