''Escape to Victory'' (stylized as ''Victory'') is a 1981 American-British-Italian
sports
Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Sports can, ...
war film
War film is a film genre concerned with warfare, typically about navy, naval, air force, air, or army, land battles, with combat scenes central to the drama. It has been strongly associated with the 20th century. The fateful nature of battle s ...
directed by
John Huston and starring
Sylvester Stallone,
Michael Caine
Sir Michael Caine (born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite; 14 March 1933) is an English actor. Known for his distinctive Cockney accent, he has appeared in more than 160 films in a career spanning seven decades, and is considered a British film ico ...
,
Max von Sydow
Max von Sydow ( , ; born Carl Adolf von Sydow; 10 April 1929 – 8 March 2020) was a Swedish-French actor. He had a 70-year career in European and American cinema, television, and theatre, appearing in more than 150 films and several television ...
and
Pelé. The film is about
Allied prisoners of war who are interned in a
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
prison camp during the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
who play an exhibition match of
football against a German team.
The film received great attention upon its theatrical release, as it also starred professional
footballers
A football player or footballer is a sportsperson who plays one of the different types of football. The main types of football are association football, American football, Canadian football, Australian rules football, Gaelic football, rugby ...
Bobby Moore,
Osvaldo Ardiles
Osvaldo César Ardiles (born 3 August 1952), often referred to in Britain as Ossie Ardiles, is an Argentine football manager, pundit and former midfielder who won the 1978 FIFA World Cup as part of the Argentina national team. He now runs his ...
,
Kazimierz Deyna
Kazimierz Deyna (; 23 October 1947 – 1 September 1989) was a Polish professional footballer who played as an attacking midfielder in the playmaker role and was one of the most highly regarded players of his generation, due to his excellent vis ...
,
Paul Van Himst
Paul Van Himst (born 2 October 1943) is a Belgian former football player and a football manager who played as a forward, most notably for R.S.C. Anderlecht.
Career
Van Himst was nicknamed ''Polle Gazon'' (''Polle'' is Paul in Brussels dialect ...
,
Mike Summerbee
Michael George Summerbee (born 15 December 1942) is an English former footballer, who played in the successful Manchester City side of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Club career
Summerbee was born in Preston, Lancashire, and raised in Ch ...
,
Hallvar Thoresen
Hallvar Thoresen (born 12 April 1957) is a former Norwegian footballer who played most of his career in the Dutch Eredivisie. The son of former Norwegian international Gunnar Thoresen, Hallvar Thoresen was central in 1980s Norwegian football.
...
,
Werner Roth and Pelé. Numerous
Ipswich Town
Ipswich Town Football Club is a professional association football club based in Ipswich, Suffolk, England. They play in League One, the third tier of the English football league system.
The club was founded in 1878 but did not turn profession ...
players were also in the film, including
John Wark
John Wark (born 4 August 1957) is a Scottish former footballer who spent most of his playing time with Ipswich Town. He won a record four Player of the Year awards before becoming one of the four inaugural members of the club's Hall of Fame. W ...
,
Russell Osman,
Laurie Sivell
Laurence Sivell (born 6 February 1951 in Lowestoft) is an English former footballer who played in the Football League as a goalkeeper for Ipswich Town and Lincoln City.
Sivell spent 15 years with Ipswich Town, between 1969 and 1984. He mad ...
,
Robin Turner
Robin David Turner (born 10 September 1955) is an English former professional footballer who played as a forward. An England youth international, he began his career at Ipswich Town. After being part of the FA Youth Cup winning squad of 1973, ...
and
Kevin O'Callaghan. Other Ipswich Town players stood in for actors in the football scenes –
Kevin Beattie
Thomas Kevin Beattie (18 December 1953 – 16 September 2018) was an English footballer. Born into poverty, he played at both professional and international levels, mostly as a centre-half. He spent the majority of his playing career at Ipswic ...
for Michael Caine, and
Paul Cooper for Sylvester Stallone. Yabo Yablonsky wrote the script and the film was entered into the
12th Moscow International Film Festival
The 12th Moscow International Film Festival was held from 7 to 21 July 1981. The Golden Prizes were awarded to the Brazilian film '' O Homem que Virou Suco'' directed by João Batista de Andrade, the Vietnamese film '' The Abandoned Field: Free ...
.
Plot
A team of
Allied prisoners of war (POWs), coached and led by English Captain John Colby, a professional footballer for
West Ham United
West Ham United Football Club is an English professional football club that plays its home matches in Stratford, East London. The club competes in the Premier League, the top tier of English football. The club plays at the London Stadium, hav ...
before the war, agree to play an
exhibition match
An exhibition game (also known as a friendly, a scrimmage, a demonstration, a preseason game, a warmup match, or a preparation match, depending at least in part on the sport) is a sporting event whose prize money and impact on the player's or ...
against a German team, only to find themselves involved in a German
propaganda stunt.
Colby is the captain and essentially the manager of the team and thus chooses his squad of players. Another POW, Robert Hatch, an American who is serving with the
Canadian Army
The Canadian Army (french: Armée canadienne) is the command responsible for the operational readiness of the conventional ground forces of the Canadian Armed Forces. It maintains regular forces units at bases across Canada, and is also res ...
, is not initially chosen, but eventually nags the reluctant Colby into letting him on the team as the team's trainer, as Hatch needs to be with the team to facilitate his upcoming escape attempt.
Colby's superior officers repeatedly try to convince him to use the match as an opportunity for an escape attempt, but Colby consistently refuses, fearing that such an attempt will only result in getting his players killed. Meanwhile, Hatch has been planning his unrelated escape attempt, and Colby's superiors agree to help him if he in return agrees to journey to
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
, contact the
French Resistance
The French Resistance (french: La Résistance) was a collection of organisations that fought the German occupation of France during World War II, Nazi occupation of France and the Collaborationism, collaborationist Vichy France, Vichy régim ...
and try to convince them to help the football team escape.
Hatch succeeds in escaping the prison camp and finding the Resistance in Paris. The Resistance initially believes it will be too risky to aid the team's escape, but once they realise the game will be at the
Colombes Stadium, they plan the escape using a tunnel from the Parisian sewer system to the showers in the players' changing room. They convince Hatch to let himself be recaptured so that he can pass this information back to the leading British officers at the prison camp.
Hatch is indeed recaptured. However, he is placed in solitary confinement, and thus the prisoners do not know if the French underground will help them. Colby tells the Germans that he needs Hatch on the team because Hatch is the backup goalkeeper and the starting goalkeeper has broken his arm. Colby himself actually has to break the starting goalkeeper's arm because the Germans want proof of the injury before they will allow Hatch to join the Allied lineup.
In the end, the POWs can leave the German camp only to play the match; they are to be imprisoned again afterward. The resistance's tunnelers break through to the Allied dressing room at halftime with the POWs trailing, 4–1. However, the team persuades Hatch to return to the pitch for the second half rather than lead the escape as planned.
Despite the
match officials being heavily biased towards the Germans, and the German team causing several deliberate injuries to the Allied players, a 4–4 draw is achieved after great performances from Luis Fernandez, Carlos Rey and Terry Brady. Hatch plays
goalkeeper
In many team sports which involve scoring goals, the goalkeeper (sometimes termed goaltender, netminder, GK, goalie or keeper) is a designated player charged with directly preventing the opposing team from scoring by blocking or intercepting o ...
and makes excellent saves, including a save of a penalty kick as time expires to deny the Germans the win. An Allied goal had been blatantly disallowed earlier in the match, so the POWs should have won, 5–4.
After Hatch preserves the draw, the crowd storms the field and swarms the players. Some of the spectators help the Allied players disguise themselves in the chaos so that they can escape, and they all burst through the gates to freedom.
Cast
Production
Development and writing
Filmed in Hungary, the film is based on the 1962 Hungarian film drama ''
Két félidő a pokolban'' ("Two half-times in Hell"), which was directed by
Zoltán Fábri
Zoltán Fábri (15 October 1917 – 23 August 1994) was a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. His films ''The Boys of Paul Street'' (1969) and ''Hungarians'' (1978) were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. H ...
and won the critics' award at the 1962 Boston Cinema Festival.
The film was inspired by the now discredited story of the so-called
Death Match in which
FC Dynamo Kyiv defeated German soldiers while Ukraine was occupied by German troops in World War II. According to myth, as a result of their victory, the Ukrainians were all shot.
The true story is considerably more complex, as the team played a series of matches against German teams, emerging victorious in all of them, before any of them were sent to prison camps by the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...
. Four players were documented as being killed by the Germans but long after the dates of the matches they had won.
Pre-production
''Escape to Victory'' featured a great many professional footballers as both the POW team and the German team. Many of the footballers came from the
Ipswich Town
Ipswich Town Football Club is a professional association football club based in Ipswich, Suffolk, England. They play in League One, the third tier of the English football league system.
The club was founded in 1878 but did not turn profession ...
squad, who were at the time one of the most
successful teams in Europe. Despite not appearing on screen, English World Cup-winning goalkeeper
Gordon Banks
Gordon Banks (30 December 1937 – 12 February 2019) was an English professional footballer who played as a goalkeeper. Widely regarded as one of the greatest goalkeepers of all time, he made 679 appearances during a 20-year professional caree ...
and Alan Thatcher were closely involved in the film, working with
Sylvester Stallone on his goalkeeping scenes. ''
Sports Illustrated
''Sports Illustrated'' (''SI'') is an American sports magazine first published in August 1954. Founded by Stuart Scheftel, it was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twi ...
'' magazine said "the game is marvelously photographed by
Gerry Fisher
Gerry Fisher, B.S.C. (23 June 1926 – 2 December 2014) was an English cinematographer.
Biography
He was born in London in 1926. Early employment by Kodak and De Havilland Aircraft was followed by service in the Royal Navy during WW II. Fish ...
, under second unit director
Robert Riger."
Since the movie is set in the early years of the German occupation of France (probably 1941 or 1942),
Pelé's character, Corporal Luis Fernandez, is identified as being from
Trinidad
Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands of Trinidad and Tobago. The island lies off the northeastern coast of Venezuela and sits on the continental shelf of South America. It is often referred to as the southernmos ...
, not Brazil. Since the Brazilians did not officially join the war against the
Axis powers
The Axis powers, ; it, Potenze dell'Asse ; ja, 枢軸国 ''Sūjikukoku'', group=nb originally called the Rome–Berlin Axis, was a military coalition that initiated World War II and fought against the Allies. Its principal members were ...
until late August 1942, with the first contingents of
Brazilian Expeditionary Force arriving in Italy in July, 1944. Similarly,
Argentinian
Argentines (mistakenly translated Argentineans in the past; in Spanish ( masculine) or ( feminine)) are people identified with the country of Argentina. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Argentines, ...
star
Osvaldo Ardiles
Osvaldo César Ardiles (born 3 August 1952), often referred to in Britain as Ossie Ardiles, is an Argentine football manager, pundit and former midfielder who won the 1978 FIFA World Cup as part of the Argentina national team. He now runs his ...
' character, Carlos Rey, is not identified as being from any particular country.
Music
Nearly all of the film's music score borrows heavily from the first and last movements of
Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, the ''
Leningrad Symphony,'' particularly the march theme of the first movement, which is quoted almost verbatim, a practice which the composer
Bill Conti
William Conti (born April 13, 1942) is an American composer and conductor, best known for his film scores, including ''Rocky'' (and four of its sequels), ''The Karate Kid'' (and all of its sequels), '' For Your Eyes Only'', ''Dynasty'' (and its ...
would later employ in
''The Right Stuff'' with
Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky , group=n ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. He wrote some of the most popu ...
's Violin Concerto. Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 has long been associated with secondary meanings within the music aimed at the
Stalinist regime's overwhelming repression of individualism and freedom of expression, but at the time of its composition during the war was said to represent the oppression of Nazism. At the end of the film, the last part of Shostakovich's
Symphony No. 5 is also used to signify the triumphant conclusion of the story. However, while the music may fulfil the final moments of ''Escape to Victory's'' exultant ending explicitly, it is believed Shostakovich wrote the ending to his symphony to imply forced rejoicing under an authoritarian force. More prosaically, the music also pays tribute to
Elmer Bernstein’s score for ''
The Great Escape''.
In 2005, the Prometheus Records label issued a limited edition soundtrack album of Conti's score.
Reception
Critical response
On
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
the film has a 67% rating based on reviews from 9. On
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...
, the film is rated 57 out of 100 based on 10 critic reviews.
Remake
In March 2019, it was announced that
Jaume Collet-Serra
Jaume Collet-Serra (; born 23 March 1974) is a Spanish-American film director and producer. He directed the horror films '' House of Wax'' (2005), '' Orphan'' (2009), and '' The Shallows'' (2016), as well as the Liam Neeson-led thriller films '' ...
will direct a remake also titled ''Victory''. A draft was written by
Gavin O'Connor and Anthony Tambakis in 2017, with Tambakis doing a rewrite.
Gianni Nunnari and Bernie Goldman will produce.
In Art
The whole audio recording of the second half of the match played in the film has been broadcast from a radio inside the Italian Pavilion of the
59° Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte La Biennale di Venezia, made by
Gian Maria Tosatti and curated by
Eugenio Viola.
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Escape To Victory
1981 films
1981 drama films
American drama films
American association football films
1980s English-language films
Films scored by Bill Conti
Films about the French Resistance
Films directed by John Huston
Films set in Germany
Films set in Paris
Films shot in Budapest
Films shot in Hungary
Paramount Pictures films
World War II films based on actual events
World War II prisoner of war films
Pelé
1980s American films