—and the 2010 World Cup, today we discuss Victory (aka Escape to Victory outside the US). A late-period John Huston picture, a middle-period Michael Caine picture, and a way way early Sly picture (he'd only done the first two Rockys and Nighthawks at that point, not even any Rambos yet), Victory is one of those movies that stacks the deck against itself by doing a lot of really dumb and lazy things and yet still ends up being a lot of fun.
As cool as John Huston, Michael Caine, and Sly can be separately, the meeting of these three particular minds are not the main attraction in Victory. Coming as it did at the tail-end of the last time America briefly tried to get into association football, a very respectable roster of real-life footballers were cast—Bobby Moore, captain of the fabled 1966 England World Cup champions; Argentine Osvaldo Ardiles, member of the 1978 World Cup champion side; spectacularly talented Polish midfielder Kazimerz Deyna; Belgian Paul Van Himst; a whole bunch of dudes from the then-successful Ipswich Town F.C.; and, last but certainly not least, arguably the most talented but inarguably the most stylish player in the history of the sport, Edison Arantes do Nascimento, nom de guerre Pelé. Watching these dudes ball is the coolest thing about Victory, and the editing is skillful enough that the actors don't get too embarrassed (Michael Caine actually looks pretty good, but boy, if Sly was in goal in a real game with actual players, his side would get fucked by like 12).
The plot is pretty simple. It's WWII. A bunch of guys in a POW camp get roped into playing an exhibition game against a Nazi all-star squad. Michael Caine, who had played for West Ham before the war, assumes the role of player-manager, and dumbass American POW Sly tries to get on the team, except he's so fucking bad they want nothing to do with him. Also, for some reason, this POW camp has the highest all-time great footballer/regular guy ratio like ever, so their team kinda fucking rules, to the point where the Germans have to cheat and deliberately injure them to stay in the game. Meanwhile, nice-guy Nazi camp commandant Max von Sydow (for real? The nice-guy Nazi? Again? Fucking the only thing that's missing is when Sly makes contact with the French Resistance he doesn't meet a hooker with a heart of gold and a lovable scamp of an orphan) is a man of culture and honor and a fanatic football fan, and cuts the footballers slack whenever he can, most notably when a trainload of emaciated dudes show up from a really fucked up Ukranian camp, and Michael Caine and Sly say “they're on our team” even though they can barely walk, because the guys on the team get hot meals and blankets and stuff.
Sly gets his way onto the team because he's been in contact with the French Resistance (who want to bust everyone out at halftime of the big game), and so they break the arm of the actually good goalkeeper and Sly miraculously gets to the point where he can actually stop the occasional goal. They thus go into the match, only to find that the Nazis are cheating like motherfuckers and have the refs totally on their side. At this point, our heroes all collectively go “hey, wait, we're all international football stars, these assholes are just a bunch of fucking Nazis.” They create a strategy every bit as revolutionary as the beautiful “Total Football” introduced by the Dutch international side in the 70s, this one revolutionary in its simplicity. I call it “Totally Rad Football,” since it consists entirely of lobbing passes over the middle for Pelé to do slow-motion bicycle kicks (taking advantage of the Nazis being so racist that they don't want to get anywhere near a black guy, thus giving him the space to do a bicycle kick) and plays where the keeper gives Pelé the ball right at the box and then Pelé dribbles the ball the length of the field, weaving in and out of the entire Nazi defense, and concluding with Pelé blasting a goal past the final hapless Nazi dipshit. It's basically the equivalent of the offense the Cavs have been running the past few years with Lebron: give Lebron the basketball, get out video camera, do Zen exercise to prevent skull from exploding.
It's not really a spoiler to say the good guys win the game in the end of Victory. I mean, look at the fucking team they're rolling out on the field. Even a past-his-prime Pelé was a bad motherfucker (when he joined the New York Cosmos in the 70s he—and to a slightly lesser extent, fellow gods Carlos Alberto, Franz Beckenbauer, and Giorgio Chinaglia—was good enough to make Americans briefly care about soccer, no mean feat), not to mention the other dudes on the team. The Nazis had to cheat to have any kind of advantage. However, the fact that they stuck around to finish the game when La Resistance was going to break them out at halftime kind of is, but everyone went so apeshit when they won that they were able to escape anyway, with a smiling Max von Sydow tacitly giving permission.
Speaking of which, let us now address the two main flaws with this movie, both listed in the above paragraph:
What the fuck is wrong with these assholes? La Resistance went to all that trouble to break them out at halftime. Do you really want to waste the one time a French person made a plan that actually worked?
Well. This is a tricky question, because it doesn't have an answer that's backed up by logic or reason, but it does nonetheless have an irrefutable answer. Why did they stick around to finish the game and risk getting chucked back in the POW camp? BECAUSE THAT IS HOW MEN DO THINGS. Men do things the hard way because occasionally, as a man, you need to flex your nuts, do something really fucking stupid, get away with it, and spend the rest of your life raising a pint and telling your friends “Remember when [feat of testicular grandeur] happened? That fuckin' ruled.” BECAUSE THIS IS THE WAY OF MEN. And anyway, Sly was the one cookin' up the plan with La Resistance, and he looked so fuckin' stupid in a beret with his shirt on (a travesty he soon corrected with the Rambo cycle) that one can hardly be faulted for doubting him.
Seriously, what the fuck is it with movies and the so-called “good Nazi?” This archetype is yucky, apocryphal, and lets a bunch of pussies who wouldn't openly stand up for what was right off the hook.
This is a much better question. Now and then there are stories about cats who would subvert from within (if Tom Cruise's Valkyrie thing actually existed—which I firmly deny; that movie was an acid flashback I had while watching the History Channel—it would count as one of these) and who were kind of all right. I always take those with a big grain of salt; actually, of all people, Quentin Tarantino nailed the reality of the “Good Nazi” in Inglourious Basterds—when Christoph Waltz gives up Hitler and the whole high command to Brad Pitt and BJ Novak, his motivations are so oily, and he himself is revealed to be such a fucking choad about it that the ends (truth, justice, American way, et al) do not justify the means (some Nazi cunt backstabbing his friends). If you were such a good guy, when Adolf and company came to you and said, “Hey, we want you to be a Nazi, and if you don't go for it we'll fucking kill you,” you would reply, “Kill me then, you swine, for yours is not a world in which I care to live,” BECAUSE THAT IS HOW MEN so on and so forth. Unfair? Sure, dying probably sucks, but when your only other choice is being a Nazi, it's the only acceptable option.
Now, with all that being said, the logical follow-up question is, “Why are you letting Victory and Max von Sydow off the hook, considering that this is one of the dumbest examples of the Good Nazi character in the history of cinema?” The answer is the Max von Sydow Corollary, to wit: Max von Sydow is so awesome he can get away with literally anything. One of the things about the Hollywood New Wave of the 70s was that all the young egomaniac cokeheads running around with cameras all had a great respect for European cinema, and Max von Sydow was one of the icons of same.
When Americans started bringing him over here to be in movies, it was almost like Max von Sydow told them, “Give me only the dumbest, most underwritten roles. Give me the generic European villain. Cast me as an ethnicity only Helen Keller could think I really was. No matter what the difficulty curve, I will fucking own that shit because I am fucking Max von Sydow. I played chess with Death. Recognize, mortals.” This theory is borne out by his role in Three Days of the Condor, where he shows up, says like two words the whole movie, the only explanation of who he is is like two lines about “the Alsatian gentleman” (an awesome character name, by the by), lets Robert Redford live almost as a fuck you, and splits. And holy FUCK is Max von Sydow awesome in Three Days of the Condor. It's all him. None of it is in the script.
For a more modern example, take Minority Report. Minority Report is a damn fine entertainment and an SF movie to be reckoned with, although it completely derails in the third act, but it does have one weird touch—Max von Sydow plays a government bureaucrat named Lamar Burgess. Now, you might think, hmm, a government bureaucrat named Lamar Burgess, that sounds like a Fred Dalton Thompson part . . . wow, did Max von Sydow learn how to do a Southern accent? Well, maybe, if his accent was southern Sweden. Yeah, Max von Sydow is swaggering around that whole fuckin' picture not even bothering to pretend to be an American, which turns out to be an exercise in Hollywood semiotics much like in The Fugitive, with the Euro accent being the signifier of villainy. Did it matter? Hell no. As stated above, Max von Sydow can do whatever the fuck he wants and he's still awesome. He's so awesome he was fucking married to Barbara Hershey in Hannah and Her Sisters, back when Barbara Hershey was one of the two or three hottest women who ever existed.
He was sullen, and old, but still so fuckin' cool that she doesn't even leave him til like the end of the picture.Which brings us to Victory. Max von Sydow is the one person in the universe who can get away with this dumb “oh, I'm from the old aristocracy, and I'm cultured, but man I love football and through my love of football I'll be revealed to be an all right guy” character, whose entire sympathy shroud unravels if you start pulling at the “Yeah, but what about all that 'Wir messen die Juden auschrotten' business?” thread. His ability to pull this role off has nothing to do with moral justification. It has to do with being Max von fucking Sydow. I like to think he took this role because it was so stupid. And maybe so he could hang out on set while all those awesome football scenes were being shot.
Other movies to watch in the agonizing hours between World Cup matches:
Mean Machine, Vinnie Jones' football remake of handegg classic The Longest Yard.
Bend it Like Beckham, which is cute and fun and has pretty girls in it.
Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, for the real-life story of arguably the most talent-loaded team in the history of sports.
Offside, about a bunch of Iranian girls who get thrown in jail for trying to watch football (not as much of a bummer as it sounds).
Rudo y Cursi, for your Gael García Bernal/Diego Luna/Alfonso & Carlos Cuarón fix.
All right, y'all. Time to get back to Australia/Germany, and figure out how the fuck we drew with England yesterday (that goal the English keeper let in . . . wow . . .) I leave you with this:
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