| Escape to Victory | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | John Huston |
| Screenplay by |
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| Story by |
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| Based on | Two Half Times in Hell byZoltán Fábri |
| Produced by | Freddie Fields |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Gerry Fisher |
| Edited by | Roberto Silvi |
| Music by | Bill Conti |
Production companies |
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| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 117 minutes |
| Countries | |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $12 million[2] |
| Box office | $27.5 million (U.S.A. Collection)[4][5] |
Escape to Victory (or simplyVictory) is a 1981sportswar film[3] directed byJohn Huston and starringSylvester Stallone,Michael Caine,Max von Sydow andPelé. The film is aboutAlliedprisoners of war who are interned in aGerman prison camp during theSecond World War who play an exhibition match offootball against a German team.
The film received great attention upon its theatrical release, as it starred professionalfootballersBobby Moore,Osvaldo Ardiles,Kazimierz Deyna,Paul Van Himst,Mike Summerbee,Hallvar Thoresen,Werner Roth and Pelé. NumerousIpswich Town players were also in the film, includingJohn Wark,Russell Osman,Laurie Sivell,Robin Turner andKevin O'Callaghan. Other Ipswich Town players stood in for actors in the football scenes –Kevin Beattie for Michael Caine, andPaul Cooper for Sylvester Stallone. Yabo Yablonsky wrote the script and the film was entered into the12th Moscow International Film Festival.[6]
A team ofAllied prisoners of war (POWs), coached and led by English Captain John Colby, a professional footballer forWest Ham United before the war, agree to play anexhibition match against a German team, only to find themselves involved in a Germanpropaganda 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 theCanadian 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 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 toParis, contact theFrench Resistance 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 theColombes 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 thematch 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 playsgoalkeeper 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.
The Germans
The French
The English
Filmed in Hungary,[7] the film is based on the 1962 Hungarian film dramaKét félidő a pokolban ("Two half-times in Hell"), which was directed byZoltán 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-calledDeath Match in whichFC 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 theGestapo. Four players were documented as being killed by the Germans but long after the dates of the matches they had won.[9]
Escape to Victory featured a great many professional footballers as both the POW team and the German team. Many of the footballers came from theIpswich Town squad, who were at the time one of the mostsuccessful teams in Europe.[10] Despite not appearing on screen, English World Cup-winning goalkeeperGordon Banks and Alan Thatcher were closely involved in the film, working withSylvester Stallone on his goalkeeping scenes.Sports Illustrated magazine said "the game is marvelously photographed byGerry Fisher, under second unit directorRobert Riger."[11]
Pelé received a credit for designing the "soccerplays".
Since the movie is set in the early years of the German occupation of France (post August 1942 as reference is made to being ‘captured at Dieppe’),Pelé's character, Corporal Luis Fernandez, is identified as being fromTrinidad, not Brazil, since Brazilians did not officially join the war against theAxis powers until late August 1942, with the first contingents of theBrazilian Expeditionary Force arriving in Italy in July, 1944. Similarly,Argentine starOsvaldo Ardiles' character, Carlos Rey, is not identified as being from any particular country.
Escape to Victory was filmed in and aroundBudapest,Hungary, portrayingParis andGerman-occupied France. The climatic football match of the Allies vs the German Wehrmacht team was filmed at the now demolishedMTK Stadium in the8th district of Budapest, standing in forColombes Stadium in Paris. MTK Stadium was chosen because it was the largest stadium without floodlights (which were largely unknown in the 1940s) the producers could find and was also structurally similar to Continental stadiums that were around during World War II.[12][13][14]
The P.O.W. camp scenes were filmed in a field in Fót, approximately 13 kilometers northeast from Budapest, situated behind the Mafilm Studios. The set with the POW barracks and soccer field took two months to construct. Other Budapest locations in the film includedKeleti Railway Station, the historicMetro Line 1, and soundstages atMafilm's main studio complex in the14th district.[15]
American composerBill Conti wrote the score, which borrows heavily from the first and last movements ofDmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, theLeningrad Symphony, particularly the march theme of the first movement, which is quoted almost verbatim. (Conti would later employ a similar practice when repurposing much ofTchaikovsky's Violin Concerto for the filmThe Right Stuff.) Though Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 was purportedly meant to represent the resistance to repressive Nazism when it debuted during World War II, he privately commented that it was a musical criticism of all tyranny and oppression, including in his nativeSoviet Union underJoseph Stalin.
At the end of the film, the last part of Shostakovich'sSymphony No. 5 is also used to signify the triumphant conclusion of the story. However, while the music may fulfil the final moments ofEscape 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 toElmer Bernstein’s score forThe Great Escape.
In 2005, the Prometheus Records label issued a limited edition soundtrack album of Conti's score.[16]
Stanley Kauffmann ofThe New Republic wrote that the movie "...wavers between insulting and uproariously stupid."[17] Film historianLeonard Maltin seemed to agree: "...Only the rightly-celebrated soccer scenes redeem this silly bore."[18]
OnRotten Tomatoes the film has a 70% rating based on reviews from 10.[19] OnMetacritic, the film is rated 57 out of 100 based on 10 critic reviews.[20]
In June 2014, it was announced thatDoug Liman was in talks to direct a remake withGavin O'Connor and Anthony Tambakis writing the script.[21] In March 2019, it was announced thatJaume Collet-Serra was in talks to direct, with Tambakis doing a further rewrite of the script.[22]
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 the59° Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte La Biennale di Venezia, made by Gian Maria Tosatti in 2022 and curated byEugenio Viola.[23]
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