Escape to Victory - World Cup Edition (DVD)

Escape to Victory was released in 1981, a film that is similar in structure to that of the war films like The Great Escape, but also different in the fact that Football really is the place where the battles are lost and won rather than the battlefield itself. When this film was released Paul McCartney's video of Pipes of Peace was always on my mind, the video tells a story of a Football match that took place in World War I where a truce was called on Christmas Day between the warring parties, Victory has overtones of this as well as the Allies playing the Germans in the Stade Colombes in Nazi occupied Paris. The plot is a simple setup, set in a prisoner of ...  Read the complete review

'Their goal was freedom...' It's been quite a long time since I sat down to watch the excellent war slash football movie Escape to Victory. Whoever came up with the concept of this film deserves a pat on the back, either for scraping the bottom of the barrel or being an absolute genius. For the uninitiated, Escape to Victory begins in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. To pass the time the allies play inter-country football matches as well as setting up their own leagues. While the working class play their football, the officers are constantly devising ways to escape the camp and back to the war. Michael Caine, here playing Captain John Colby, is ...  Read the complete review

1981 saw the release of this star-studded film with greats from the cinematic world as well as the footballing world lining up in the credits to form part of this WW2 film which uses football as a means for an Allied plan of escape from a POW camp. Directed by John Huston, it has been one of my favourite films since I first saw it in the early 1990s, and it remains one of the few films I can watch start to finish and be riveted all the way through, no matter how many times I've seen it. The plot is well worked out. A group of POWs in a Nazi prison camp during WW2 decide to use a nationally advertised football match between the guards and the cons to stage an ...  Read the complete review