26 Mar Victory
Victory, WWII Movie starring Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone, and a long list of excellent soccer players
(1981) A group of Allied prisoners in a German POW camp train to challenge a German soccer team.
Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that and turned out to be an exciting and enjoyable story, even though it’s based on a true event that turned out to be anything but.
There was a Hungarian movie filmed around 1962 called Two Half-Times in Hell inspired also by 1941 events in the Ukraine.
A recently published book titled Dynamo details this series of football games (we call it soccer) in the Ukraine between local players and the Nazis.
Victory (also known as Escape to Victory) is a fantasy of what might have happened in a different world. What if all the best imprisoned soccer players in the world could all come together and challenge the best German team? What if their Nazi captors gave them extra rations, beer, uniforms, good shoes, and brought them to Paris to play? Well, it would be one great game, and it was.
I watched Victory as part of the An Officer and a Movie series in which host Lou Diamond Phillips interviews a military officer about the film being shown. For Victory, the guest officer was a former POW who explained that the circumstances in the real life POW camp he had experienced were nothing like this one.
This movie was a tribute to football. To soccer as we know it. All the soccer players in the movie were real international footballers of the time. Here is an online Match Report. Pelé not only was one of the players, his production company was also involved.
Just one final word about star Sylvester Stallone. My first impression was that he didn’t look one bit like a POW, although I read that he lost 40 pounds in order to not look like Rocky (1976 and 1979.) Once he got to Paris wearing a beret, he did look more the part.
No Comments