The co-star Michael Caine felt honoured to work with: “It was such a great privilege”
The general consensus on the 1981 football film Escape to Victory can be summed up as “almost OK”. Football fans weren’t impressed (or soccer fans if you had the misfortune of being born in the only country that doesn’t enjoy the sport), and critics liked it even less. The only real praise the film received was for its football scenes, which were admittedly fun—though the rest of the movie was largely dismissed as silly and contrived. The exception? Michael Caine, of course.
The legendary actor, who starred alongside Sylvester Stallone, Max von Sydow, was glowing in his praise for arguably the sport’s greatest athlete, Pelé. Even if you’ve never sat through a match without getting bored, you probably know who Pelé is, and it’s perhaps not for his film career.
The great Pelé died on December 29th, 2022. Michael Caine recalls working with the iconic footballer as a “huge honour” and refers to the late football phenom as “the most outstanding football talent who could act”. Co-star Sylvester Stallone paid tribute to him as well, referring to him, verbatim, as “Pelé the Great! Rest in peace! This was a good man.”
It may seem odd, given the film’s sour reputation and Michael Caine’s historic refusal to defend his own work if he thinks it’s terrible, but he remembers Escape to Victory fondly, at least because he got to work with Pelé. Everyone gets starstruck sometimes, even Michael Caine.
Escape to Victory, for its part, is about a fictionalised World War II propaganda stunt pulled by the Nazis to have Allied prisoners of war play in an exhibition football match against a more professional and qualified German team. If you haven’t seen it, the film is fairly predictable from there, and it hardly counts as a spoiler to say that the underdog team wins in a sports film. However, it’s rendered a draw due to some controversy with the refereeing, which inspired righteous social justice. Against the Nazis, if you can imagine.
Pelé himself is renowned for starring in the World Cup at 17 years old, scoring more than 1000 goals, for his speed, precision and ball control via his verticals, which insulted gravity as a concept. He’s in this movie, playing Corporal Luis Fernandez, a POW conscripted by Michael Caine’s character, Captain John Colby, a former footballer, the captain and de facto manager of the team. The rest of the cast is mostly rounded out by football stars pretending to be soldiers, with standouts like England’s own Bobby Moore and all-time great midfielder Osvaldo César Ardiles.
You’re far more likely to have seen the iconic photos of Pelé soaring through the air to head a decisive goal against Italy in the 1970 World Cup final than to have watched this film. It’s not all bad, but the sports genre in cinema is notoriously difficult to pull off. These films tend to be either overly sentimental or so tethered to the sport they cover that only hardcore fans would enjoy them—and they’d usually just rather watch the sport itself.
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