Fussbol with gravitas.

Rating: 5/10 (19 September 2007)

This kind of football is serious business. Oh, I know it seems silly for a group of Allied prisoners during World War II to sacrifice their chance to escape just so they can go back and whup the pro team of Nazis. A ridiculous fantasy. It's just a game, after all.
But there seems to be something about what Americans call soccer that really gets the testosterone flowing. There have been several riots over the last decade or two in soccer stadiums, some with fatalities. And in 1968, shortly after a three-game series between El Salvador and Honduras, we had the so-called soccer war between the two impoverished Central American countries. The armed forces were engaged. A C-47 flew over the enemy's lines, rolling 50 gallon drums and other ammunition out the door, hoping some of it might somehow explode. It would have been comic had not 2,000 people died, 8,000 been wounded, and perhaps 50,000 displaced.
John Huston must have made this kind of movie for that kind of audience. It's one of his minor works and we don't get to see the director having any real fun putting it together. It's about a rag tag team of POWs thrown against a Nazi team and passing up their opportunity to escape in order to finish the game. (Guess who wins.) I gather that our team is made up of real-life soccer heroes. Even a provincial American has heard of Pele. Except for Rocky Balboa, who is the world's heavyweight boxing champion. Oh, and Michael Caine, whose paycheck couldn't have been of sufficient magnitude to compensate him for the waste of his natural acting talent in this movie. It's really not much more than a big soccer game climax grafted onto a standard POW escape movie.
You ought to hear the Shastakovich-like heroic music when one of the teams wins. I'll bet that gets the old testosterone flowing, but I think I'll stick with those lines of wooden figures that kick a ball bearing back and forth on a table top. That way, if I have a chance to escape from prison, I can just say the hell with it and run away.