Kino Eye: Football on film

A football film? Not an easy choice: as a critic once put it, you either have footballers who can’t act or actors who can’t play football. The end-product is fairly predictable.

A good illustration is the ludicrous Escape to Victory (directed by John Huston, 1981) where a scratch team of World War 2 POWs (which for some inexplicable reason includes Pelé) take on a crack German team and force a draw while managing to escape their captors in the post-match chaos. It’s good for a laugh — and not much else — but was partly inspired by a much better Hungarian film Two Half Times in Hell (1961) directed by Zoltán Fábri, which was in turn inspired by a real life match between Ukrainian POWs and a Luftwaffe team in Kyiv on 9 August 1942.

The Ukrainians, calling themselves Start, beat the Nazis 5-3. It was actually a replay of an earlier game which the Ukrainians, most of them former players for Dynamo Kyiv and Lokomotiv, also won. Unfortunately, Fábri’s film is hard to locate and has no English subtitles. Instead, have a look at Andy Dougan’s excellent book, Dynamo: Triumph and Tragedy in Nazi Occupied Kiev.