How Pele and a team of ‘soccer’-averse Americans made Escape to Victory the perfect football film

The ball whipped through the air lightning fast, framed by the drab Hungarian sky. Pelé jumped, executing a perfect bicycle kick that rattled the back of the net. “Cut!” yelled director John Huston as the Brazilian’s teammates rushed to embrace him. At first time of asking, the greatest footballer on earth had pulled off a one-in-million shot.

“That ball comes in at close to 100 miles an hour and these players are running at almost full tilt,” recalled Sylvester Stallone, Pelé’s co-star in the 1981 Second World War football movie Escape to Victory. “You don't really realise the genius of Pelé until you see it slowed down: how can anyone have 800 muscles coordinated at the same time?”

The cameras loved Pelé almost as much as opposing players feared him. And his super-star charisma was cranked up all the way in Escape to Victory, in which the footballing icon, who has passed away aged 82, played a POW with a devastating left foot.

“It was fantastic for me. I had an opportunity to learn a little bit about performance and not only about football,” recalled Pelé, who portrayed Trinidadian Corporal Luis Fernandez (Brazil having sat out the War).

“At that time, Sylvester Stallone… he should have been the centre forward. He should have been the player who scored the goal. But Stallone doesn't know how to make the bicycle kick. He went into goals – I did the bicycle kick. It was a fantastic experience for me. John Huston was like a coach.”

Escape to Victory tells the story of a plucky band of Allied POWs who defeat an XI of Nazis and then, using the game as cover, dash to freedom.

The movie’s climactic final scene called for an Allied player to pull off a technically daunting overhead kick at full pelt, thus securing a 4-4 draw. Because of the complicated way Huston had chosen to capture the action, just three takes were possible. The one ray of light was that the footballer called upon to execute the manoeuvre was Edson Arantes do Nascimento, aka Pelé.

“Huston said to us that it was a super slo-mo camera, and in those days it cost a fortune. It was thousands of pounds per second,” recalled Ipswich Town left-winger Kevin O’Callaghan, whose job it was to set up the intricate passing move that would culminate in Pelé’s bicycle kick. “He said, we’ve got three takes to do this.”

Pelé, then 40, was some way off his prime. The Brazilian legend had also spent the past five weeks in an environment even more pressured than a World Cup final: the set of a major Hollywood production. Still, when it came to the most crucial sequence in Escape to Victory, he delivered first time. In went the cross, up went Pelé and, boom, the connection was made.

Huston, director of The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen and Moby Dick, knew as much about football as Roy Hodgson does about the French New Wave. Stallone, its biggest star, had barely heard of Pelé. Michael Caine, portraying a former England international whose career had been rudely interrupted by the war, was 47 and looked it.

The actual footballers assembled by Huston were a mixed bag, too. Pelé lined out alongside former-England captain Bobby Moore and Argentina and Spurs dynamo Ossie Ardiles (which made for three World Cup winners when you added Pelé). The starry ensemble was padded out with players from Suffolk Galácticos Ipswich Town, whose manager Bobby Robson was friendly with Escape to Victory producer Freddie Fields.

“He came to the ground and asked if any of us wanted to take part in a movie,” recalled robust Scottish midfielder John Wark, who played one of the POWs recruited by Caine’s Captain John Colby to defeat the Nazis. “Five of us put our hands up – and that was only because we weren't doing anything that summer. We genuinely didn't realise how big it was going to be until we were in Hungary.”

Escape to Victory was inspired by the apocryphal true tale of a World War II “Death Match” in occupied Ukraine. The story, subsequently debunked as Soviet propaganda, went that “FK Start”, comprised of POWs from Kyiv’s two professional teams, was instructed to lose to the German “Flakelf” side. Instead, the Ukrainians thrashed the Germans 5-3. They were promptly marched off to the stalag for their sins.

Huston spruces up a rather grim tale with Hollywood stardust. Caine played Allied Captain Colby. The late Max Von Sydow was German Major Karl von Steiner, a former German international who proposes the game to lift spirits on both sides (his superiors, of course, hijack the tie and turn it into a propaganda exercise). And Stallone, then arguably the biggest movie star in the world coming off Rocky and Rocky II is the token American, parachuted in to appeal to the US market.

His involvement had come about in unusual circumstances. Stallone had been looking to buy a beach house in Malibu. One of the properties on the market belonged to producer Fields, whose movies include Jonathan Demme’s Handle with Care and American Gigolo (as well as Dudley Moore’s bizarre 1980 Life of Brian rip-off, Wholly Moses!).

The house, as it happened, was too small for Stallone. Fields didn’t care about that. He buttonholed the actor and told him all about his latest project. As it happened, Fields had a script to hand. Stallone took it home. Three days later the producer got the call: Sly wanted in.

Budapest’s MTK Stadion stadium had been chosen as a stand-in for Paris’s Stade Colombes, where the POWs were supposedly playing the Nazis. It looked authentically antediluvian and, crucially, lacked floodlights (which didn’t become standard until after the War).

“I hadn't filmed in Budapest before, but I had gone there for Elizabeth Taylor's birthday party for four days, and I only remembered it in a sort of alcoholic haze,” Caine would recall. “But when I got back there in the full clear light of day – bloody hell – Communism depresses me more than a little bit. I got over the depression by drinking too much cherry brandy, which is a real bugger.”

An even bigger challenge than the political divide in Europe was Stallone’s ego. As Pelé pointed out, he’d insisted his character, Captain Robert Hatch, score the winning goal. He apparently didn’t realise that, as a goalkeeper, this would be a little far-fetched, even for Hollywood. Instead screenwriter Jeff Maguire tacked on a scene in which Stallone saves a penalty, just to keep Sly onside.

Stallone, who was receiving goal-keeping lessons from England World Cup winner Gordon Banks, had already earned the disdain of the footballers in the cast by turning up with two bodyguards and refusing to eat with the crew. He even embarked on a work-to-rule when left waiting around for three hours after an early start one morning. The next day, he insisted, he would make the time back by arriving three hours behind schedule. As the other star, Caine felt it necessary to intervene.

“We all sat for hours the next morning waiting for him because we had nothing to shoot without him,” Caine wrote in his 2010 autobiography What’s It All About. “All eyes now turned on me since I was also a star in the movie and everybody was curious to see my reaction to being kept waiting so rudely for three hours. I think they secretly hoped I would have a row with Sly, but I had other plans.

“When he finally arrived I asked very pointedly if I could have a word with him in private for a moment. The tension increased on set as everyone thought, here it comes – the big bust up – but I took him aside and told him that I had been to a party the night before and had not had time to learn my lines.

“He had saved me, I said gratefully, by giving me time to learn them with the delay. I added that I was going to another party that night and had a lot of dialogue tomorrow. Could he possibly be a couple of hours late again?… He was never late again. “

Stallone was also unhappy with Huston’s minimalist style. As the director of Rock and Rocky II, Stallone had given detailed instructions to his cast. Huston, by contrast, just turned up and started shooting.

Caine rolled with it. Stallone wouldn’t stop grumbling. Finally, he convinced Caine to go with him to Huston. But the director wasn’t having it. “If you’ve cast your actors correctly Sly, there is not much you have to say to them,” he said. “Only directors who don’t know how to cast actors have to talk to them all the time.” Stallone was mollified but only a bit. On the way out he whispered to Caine, “I still think a director should say something to the f______ actors.”

Against all odds Escape to Victory became a decent-sized hit, even in America where it was released as Victory. It remains fondly regarded to this day – a rainy -afternoon staple to watch alongside The Great Escape, to which it pays homage with its jaunty theme.

A remake was even mooted to be directed by Doug Liman. He worked with Tom Cruise on Edge of Tomorrow, raising the delicious possibility of Cruise prowling the penalty box in the Stallone role of Allied net-minder.

One reason for Escape to Victory’s longevity is that the football scenes are reasonably authentic. Yes, Caine huffs about a lot for a supposed West Ham and England star. But the footballers are enjoying themselves lumping the super-heavy retro football around. And the slow-motion sequences, shot by famed American sports photographer Robert Riger, have a balletic quality.

Stroppy Sly Stallone and the dreariness of Cold War Hungary notwithstanding it’s clear that most of those involved are having a hoot. “Sometimes movies are like a kid’s dream come true,” Caine would write. “In this film I was the captain of our football team, which included such great names as Pelé, Bobby Moore, Ossie Ardiles and the Polish World Cup Captain Kazimierz Deyna … it truly was like a schoolboy’s fantasy come true.”