Escape to Victory: The Best Soccer Film Ever Made
It was during the final sequence of John Huston’s severely underrated (and underappreciated) 1981 film, Escape to Victory (or Victory for Americans), that I had to contain my emotions, as Luis Fernandez (Pelé), while injured, performs an overhead kick to tie the soccer game against the Germans that the French crowd begins to find signs of hope. The inspirational (but fictitious story) of Allied prisoners of war who agree to play against Nazi Germany in a “friendly” soccer match, as a pretext for their escape, is not only one of the best war films ever made, but the best movie in a sub-genre of “sports” movies, the soccer film.
Biopics or sports films tend to be my least favorite “genres” (if you will) as they are riddled with predictability, almost every time. There’s no real form of suspense that morphs when you most likely know that the team will win. John Huston fully knows that going into Victory. Quickly, he tells the audience that they should be uninterested in the match’s outcome, and they should be more focused on the character dynamics between the Allied and the Germans, but also how the team’s VICTORY is a pretext for hope — as the world can’t find any signs of that word as long as the Nazis’ fascist dictatorship prevails. The game isn’t just supposed to be friendly, in and of itself, even if John Colby (Michael Caine) is friendly with Major Karl von Steiner (Max von Sydow) to make sure he’s on his side. Some critics believe that Escape to Victory sympathizes Nazis — as they aren’t as despicable as they were in real life. However, Huston prefers to humanize Sydow’s Karl von Steiner, as he had a life before the war (he was a soccer player and almost won the World Cup) and wants it to end, as quickly as possible, so he (and everyone) can return to a semblance of normalcy. Steiner isn’t really a Nazi sympathizer — as it is hinted multiple times during the runtime. He “follows the herd”, as he probably didn’t have much of a choice in his “past life”.
Sydow doesn’t just play Steiner as a “mean” Nazi, as most movies would portray them, but makes the audience understand that, like many, Steiner is just another individual drawn into the horrors of war through propaganda and/or force. He promises the Allies a “fair match”, with no rigged referees, until he realizes that the Germans fixed the match and got the referee they wanted — because the game is now used as a propaganda stunt to showcase just how powerful the dominating ideology is. Colby quickly realizes that it isn’t just a soccer match anymore, and, when they have a chance to escape safely from the clutches of Nazism, they don’t take it and return to play, even if its goalkeeper, Hatch (Sylvester Stallone), is reluctant that they can win. But Colby and others believe they can do it. As Dr. Wayne W. Dyer beautifully says in Being in Balance (2006):
I get what I think about, whether I want it or not.
The team starts realigning their thoughts, after being viciously beaten in the first-half of the game, with some of the most suspense-filled sports action I’ve ever seen. Every shot that juxtaposes one another is an absolute thrill, and when the Allies get severely injured by the Germans, it’s exactly like being in the battlefield. It’s as unpredictable and vicious as the horrors of war. They are being slaughtered, massacred until they can barely breathe. After spending (lots) of time with the characters in the prison and seeing them come together as a team, the final-half of the soccer game is when Victory soars from highly-enjoyable sports film to something truly special. The team starts to realize that, in order to overcome their biggest challenge, they must do it together. They’re not only at war with them physically, but psychologically as well. As soon as they do that, the French spectators begin to see signs of true hope, not just on the soccer-field but also on the battlefield. They start chanting, repeatedly, “Victoire! Victoire! Victoire!” and sing “La Marseillaise” to lift the Allies’ spirits up, so much so, that even Steiner starts clapping for the Allies when Fernandez performs his overhead kick.
This is why he doesn’t do anything when he sees them escaping with the crowd after Hatch saves a potential goal from the Germans. They’ve won their war, fair and square, and deserve their freedom. He sits down, in pride, thinking about the challenges’ the allies overcame when they worked together. They reignated the “flame” of its spectators and gave them hope, when they especially needed it. Victory’s message is clichéd, yes, but transcends in every dire situation. No matter how dire the situation is at the moment, we shall overcome it together. That’s how we’ve always done it, and that’s how we will always do it. If you want your spirits lifted during this dark period of our contemporary society, I can’t recommend Escape to Victory enough. A must-see for all.
