In 'Overlord,' The Sacrifices Of the Expendable

War is unkind to children and ordinary men.

It is, on the other hand, extremely kind to extraordinary men: heroes, generals, presidents. They get the glory and the girls, write the books, have the movies made about them. They do everything important associated with wars except the most important: win them.

Wars are won by ordinary men, in the millions, who'd rather be somewhere else, doing something else, and who hate the noise, the death, the ill-fitting uniforms and the general coarsening of the human experience. Finally, someone has made a movie about one of them.

Actually the movie was made in 1975, but somehow never made it to these shores, despite a rapturous reception at the time. It's called "Overlord," after the nom de guerre of the Normandy invasion, and its usage of that oh-so-dramatic code word, conjuring romance, intrigue and the movement and leadership of hundreds of thousands, is wickedly ironic. "Overlord" isn't about Normandy, not really, but about one tiny, brief participant, Pvt. Tom Beddows, who in one sense was negligible and in another explains why I write today in English and not German.

"Overlord" is less a movie than a conceit, however; it's an extremely clever weave of components, combining, almost flawlessly, the dramatized and the archival, the result being a hybrid of forms. It follows Pvt. Beddows from the day he's called up to the day he hits the beach. Beddows (played by a decent young fellow named Brian Stirner) isn't an alpha male; he's probably not even a beta or a chi; he's right in the middle of the alphabet. We watch him saying goodbye to Mum and Dad, putting on his sport coat, tying up his tie and taking off for camp. So veddy British. Pip, pip, play up, do your bit, all that sort of thing. The film is black-and-white, the archaeological details correct and exact, but the scale extremely small.

He heads by train toward London, and suddenly we get a kind of archival work-up of London under the Blitz: German bombsight footage, blazing buildings, the skyline radiant with the glow of hyper-destruction, all of it footage from the British Imperial War Museum. In fact, "Overlord" is a co-production of the War Museum, which made its archives available for filmmaker Stuart Cooper. Thus the film is a kind of threading together of micro and macro, in a way completely without precedent.

As the movie's feature aspect follows Beddows through a typical army experience, a kind of counter-narrative tracks the course of World War II, though without the ominous "official" declarations of time and date. Rather, it's a kind of iconographic chronology, more meaningful if you're familiar with the pictorial history of the war, as well as the dates and places.

As I said, the Blitz is evoked, roughly placing Beddows's call-up in 1941; in 1942, while he's in training, the film re-creates the British night bombing campaign against the German cities; in '43, while he's still in training, it chronicles the arrival -- overfed, overpaid, overweight and over there -- of the Americans. Finally, just before D-Day, it briefly evokes a night of puppy love he shared with a young woman (Julie Neesam), so if he faced the Germans at Gold Beach or Sword Beach a virgin, at least he wasn't that even more pathetic specimen, the boy who's never been kissed.

The movie is resolutely antiheroic. The NCOs, briefly glimpsed, are martinets but not psycho bullies; the other rankers are decent if more or less dim men. Beddows is no Audie Murphy, just a kid who thinks he's not going to make it (seeing his own death, in the posture of Robert Capra's famous hit-and-dying Spanish infantryman from 1936), who learns to smoke and march, who toughens up a bit but never into Sgt. Rock, who then hits the beach.

No, he wasn't a hero. But the movie makes the point: His sacrifice, however small in the light of greater issues, was immense to him. And, in the end, it was enough.

Overlord (88 minutes, at the AFI Silver Theatre) is not rated but contains scenes of emotional intensity.