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‘Let’s go back ... We can win this!’
Asif Burhan speaks to Russell Osman about the 40th anniversary of the iconic film Escape to Victory
Actor Michael Caine, left, and footballer Bobby Moore in Leicester Square, London
IT WAS the line that altered the course of movie history. With the Allied football team trailing 4-1 to the Nazis, Ipswich Town’s 21-year-old centreback, Russell Osman, stepped up ahead of Pele and Bobby Moore as Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine prepared to escape and uttered the immortal words: “I don’t want to go. Let’s go back … We can win this!”
Forty years ago today, Victory, directed by renowned film-maker John Huston, was released in the United States. Better known around the world as Escape to Victory, the film was a remake of the 1961 Hungarian release Ket felido a pokolban (Two Half Times in Hell) and based upon the Soviet propaganda myth of a Ukrainian team who were executed at Babi Yar in Kiev after winning a game against their German occupiers.
Deviating from that tragic ending, Escape to Victory instead uses the match between a hastily assembled group of prisoners of war and a Nazi select 11 to tell an allegorical story of the second world war on a football field.
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