Escape to Victory

Escape to Victory (stylized as Victory) is a 1981 American sports war film directed by John Huston and starring Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, Max von Sydow and Pelé. The film is about Allied prisoners of war who are interned in a German prison camp during the Second World War who play an exhibition match of football against a German team.

Escape to Victory
Theatrical release poster
Directed byJohn Huston
Produced byFreddie Fields
Mario Kassar
Screenplay by
Story by
Based onTwo Half Times in Hell
by Zoltán Fábri
Starring
Music byBill Conti
CinematographyGerry Fisher
Edited byRoberto Silvi
Production
company
Distributed byParamount Pictures
Release date
  • July 30, 1981 (1981-07-30) (United States)
Running time
117 minutes
CountryUnited States[1][2]
LanguageEnglish
Budget$10 million[3]
Box office$27.5 million[4][5]

The film received great attention upon its theatrical release, as it also starred professional footballers Bobby Moore, Osvaldo Ardiles, Kazimierz Deyna, Paul Van Himst, Mike Summerbee, Hallvar Thoresen, Werner Roth and Pelé. Numerous Ipswich Town players were also in the film, including John Wark, Russell Osman, Laurie Sivell, Robin Turner and Kevin O'Callaghan. Further Ipswich Town players stood-in for actors in the football scenes – Kevin Beattie 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.[6]

Plot

A team of Allied prisoners of war (POWs), coached and led by English Captain John Colby (Michael Caine), a professional footballer for West Ham United before the war, agree to play an exhibition match 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 (Sylvester Stallone), an American who is serving with the Canadian Army, 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 Colby 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, make contact with the French Resistance, and try to convince them to help the football team escape.

Hatch succeeds in escaping the prison camp, travelling to Paris, and finding the Resistance; at first, the Resistance decides that the plan to help the football team escape is too risky, but once they realise the game will be at the Colombes Stadium they plan the escape using a tunnel from the Paris sewer system to the showers in the players' changing room. They convince Hatch to let himself be recaptured, so he can pass information along back to the leading British officers at the prison camp.

Hatch is indeed recaptured, and is put in solitary confinement. Because of this, the prisoners do not know whether the intended escape has actually been planned with the underground, so 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 actually has to break the existing goalkeeper's arm because the Germans want proof of his injury before they will agree to let Hatch onto the team.

In the end, the POWs can leave the German camp only to play the match; they are to be imprisoned again following the match. The resistance's tunnellers break through to the showers in the dressing room at halftime, in an escape Hatch leads. But the rest of the team (led by Russell Osman saying "but we can win this") persuade him to continue the game, despite being behind 4–1 at halftime.

Despite the match officials being heavily biased towards the Germans, and the German team causing several deliberate injuries to the Allied players, a draw is achieved after great performances from Luis Fernandez (portrayed by Pelé), Carlos Rey (portrayed by Osvaldo Ardiles) and Terry Brady (portrayed by Bobby Moore). Hatch plays goalkeeper, and makes excellent saves including one last save from a penalty kick as time expires to deny the Germans the win, drawing the game 4–4. An Allied goal had been blatantly disallowed earlier in the match, so the POW team should have won 5–4.

The POWs do manage to escape at the end of the game following the original plan, amid the confusion caused by the crowd storming the field (shouting "victoire") after Hatch preserved the draw.

Cast

Allies

Germans

Others
  • Anton Diffring as commentator though his voice was not used
  • Jürgen Andersen as German civilian

Production

Development and writing

Filmed in Hungary,[7] 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 and won the critics' award at the 1962 Boston Cinema Festival.[8]

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. Four players were documented as being killed by the Germans but long after the dates of the matches they had won.[9]

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 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 and Alan Thatcher were closely involved in the film, working with Sylvester Stallone on his goalkeeping scenes. Sports Illustrated magazine said "the game is marvelously photographed by Gerry Fisher, under second unit director Robert Riger."[10]

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, not Brazil. The Brazilians did not join the war against the Axis powers until 1943, with the Brazilian Expeditionary Force arriving in Italy in 1944. Similarly, Argentinian star Osvaldo Ardiles' character, Carlos Rey, isn't identified as being from any particular country (as Argentina was mostly neutral during the war), though it is generally thought that Rey was from either Mexico or Costa Rica.

Music

Nearly all of the film's music score borrows heavily from the first and last movements of Dmitri Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, particularly the march theme of the first movement, which is almost quoted verbatim, a practice which the composer Bill Conti would later employ in The Right Stuff with Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 has always 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

The film holds a 67% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes.[11] On Metacritic, the film is rated 57 out of 100 based on 10 critic reviews.[12]

Remake

In March 2019, it was announced that Jaume Collet-Serra will direct a remake also titled Victory.[13]

References
  1. "Victory (1981)". British Film Institute. Retrieved March 19, 2018.
  2. "Victory". American Film Institute Catalog of Feature Films. Retrieved March 19, 2018.
  3. Box Office Information for Escape to Victory.The Wrap. Retrieved April 5, 2013. Archived March 4, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
  4. "Victory (1981)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved March 19, 2018.
  5. "Victory (1981) - Financial Information". The Numbers. Retrieved March 19, 2018.
  6. "12th Moscow International Film Festival (1981)". MIFF. Archived from the original on April 21, 2013. Retrieved January 27, 2013.
  7. Murray, Scott. "Escape to Victory - Still the Greatest Football Movie Ever Made". thelab.bleacherreport.com. Retrieved September 30, 2020.
  8. Child, Ben (March 23, 2010). "Vinnie Jones keen for David Beckham to slip into Bobby Moore's shoes for an Escape to Victory remake". The Guardian. London. Retrieved March 28, 2011.
  9. Dougan, Andy (June 28, 2012). Dynamo: Defending the Honour of Kiev. Harper Collins UK. ISBN 978-0007404780. Retrieved August 19, 2018.
  10. Deford, Frank (August 10, 1981). "P.O.W., Right In The Kisser". Sports Illustrated. Retrieved August 19, 2018.
  11. "Escape to Victory (Victory) (1981)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved July 28, 2018.
  12. "Victory". Metacritic. Retrieved July 28, 2018.
  13. Gonzalez, Umberto (March 12, 2019). "Jaume Collet-Serra to Direct 'Victory' Remake at Warner Bros (Exclusive)". The Wrap. Retrieved March 13, 2019.
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