When I was a little kid in the 1980s, I must have seen Escape To Victory on HBO a hundred times. Also simply titled Victory, the Sylvester Stallone movie is about World War II Allied POWs playing against German Nazis in a game of soccer (football, for you outside the U.S.).
Escape To Victory also stars Michael Caine and Max von Sydow, but one of the most extraordinary things about the film was casting real professional soccer players from different countries. Among them was Brazilian soccer legend Pelé, who had some appreciable dialogue and screen time. In addition to being one of the movie's headliners, Pelé also designed the soccer plays for the film.
Coincidentally, Bill Conti, who composed the music for Sylvester Stallone's Rocky and its theme song ("Gonna Fly Now"), did the score for Escape To Victory. The soundtrack, which oddly was not available till many years later, is still one of my all-time favorites. I loved the music in the film so much that when I was little, I took this GE tape recorder and recorded the film score from a dinky TV speaker.
Escape To Victory is not based on actual events, but the story is a brilliant idea for a movie about WWII. There is an abundance of sports films, yet ones about soccer make up a small percentage of the genre. Still, Escape To Victory is one of the best sports films ever, and the icing on the cake was featuring real-life players in the movie, particularly one of the most famous of them all.
Rest in peace, Pelé.
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