On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: Witness the Weirder Work of a True Cinematic Athlete
In 1981, the unlikely trio of Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone, and Max Von Sydow came together to star in director John Huston’s “Escape to Victory” (released as simply “Victory” in the U.S.), a war and sports movie that also starred a who’s who of then-celebrity soccer players like Pelé and Bobby Moore. A remake of the much more colorfully titled Hungarian film “Two Half Times in Hell,” “Victory” tells the story of a group of Allied POWs who play an exhibition soccer match against their Nazi captors, a game that comes to symbolize something far larger than what’s on the scoreboard.
If that premise sounds familiar, it should — it’s basically the same concept (guards vs. prisoners in an athletic match) that propelled Robert Aldrich’s 1974 Burt Reynolds vehicle “The Longest Yard.” But where that movie was an irreverent comedy that felt right at home in the era of Robert Altman, Patty Hearst, and political turmoil at home and overseas, “Victory” plays it straight. It’s as earnest and classically constructed as “The Longest Yard” is raucous and shaggy, as much a reflection of its more conformist (both in terms of cinema and politics) time as “The Longest Yard” was of the year in which Richard Nixon got tossed out on his ass.
It’s an interesting bit of old-fashioned escapism from one of the least soothing directors to come out of the classical Hollywood system; right from the beginning, with his directorial debut “The Maltese Falcon” in 1941, John Huston made movies that curdled with moral ambiguity, if not outright cynicism. His “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” remains one of the most gleefully and authentically nasty films ever to come out of Hollywood’s dream factory, and later works like “The Asphalt Jungle,” “Beat the Devil,” and “The Misfits” are comparably bleak and confrontational.
It’s perhaps not surprising that in his old age Huston would mellow a bit, as he did with “Victory” and the film that followed it, the big-budget musical extravaganza “Annie.” What’s fascinating is that these two movies are sandwiched in between some of his weirdest and most ambitious work. The year before “Victory” Huston made a Canadian tax shelter slasher film (!), “Phobia,” and he finished his career off after “Annie” with three exquisite gems in a row: “Under the Volcano,” “Prizzi’s Honor,” and “The Dead,” each of which was as daring, complex, and visually accomplished as anything in the director’s career.
Indeed, Huston was on a bit of a streak starting in 1979, when he helmed his hypnotic adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood.” At a time when contemporaries like Billy Wilder and Richard Brooks were losing their cultural relevance (and their financing), Huston kept making movies at a clip of nearly one a year. How did he do it? In a way, the fact that Huston was made up of two halves — one part iconoclastic maverick, one part old school craftsman — gave him an edge his fellow septuagenarians lacked.
While the best films of his early career, like “Madre,” tended to synthesize his polarities, Huston’s late years were spent toggling between the two depending on the demands of the marketplace and the financing opportunities afforded him. As someone who couldn’t care less about sports (as Martin Scorsese once said, “anything with a ball, no good”), for me the value of “Victory” lies less in its content or celebrity athlete appearances than in the pleasure of watching an old pro like Huston taking his own last victory lap as an escapist entertainer.
“Annie,” for all its pleasures, was a bit of a behemoth, nearly crushing Huston and the actors under its weight. “Victory” is more perfectly calibrated, an elegantly balanced ensemble film that expertly delivers the satisfactions of multiple genres (the sports movie, the WWII film, the prison escape picture) and provides a showcase for three very different types of movie stars, serving them all equally well. Objectively speaking, it’s kind of a weird movie with a weird premise — but Huston pulls it all together as gracefully as he orchestrated all those complicated plot twists in his filmmaking debut 40 years earlier. —Jim Hemphill
The Bite: Bend It Like… That Really Brave Ukrainian Baker?
Before I say anything more about the most predictable cheating scandal in cinematic sports history (you’re telling me that the Nazis… lied?!), I should probably admit that Jim didn’t actually recommend “Victory” for me to watch this week. Like a lot of After Dark picks, I actually got interested in this cult film while researching another subject — and then bullied a colleague who had already seen it into taking the credit.
In this case, my point of interest was the World Cup. But like Jim, I’m not much of a sports girl. And having already watched the Portuguese sci-fi comedy “Diamantino” as my alternative-to-FIFA programming in 2023 (read that After Dark selection here!), this bizarre POW drama won me over faster with its curdled politics than its presumably timeless display of athletics.
In fact, watching “Victory” today, I couldn’t help but think about just how much the world has changed since Huston’s film premiered in 1981. Back then, Sylvester Stallone was one of Hollywood’s most beloved action stars. Now, he’s still famous but, fairly or unfairly, closely associated with the conservative backlash currently reshaping much of the entertainment industry under President Trump.
That kind of social baggage isn’t Stallone’s fault, but it does make for a uniquely uncomfortable viewing experience in light of modern events. The token American in a group of WWII Allies that would honestly do way better without him, Stallone’s Hatch spends far too much of “Victory” looking out for himself (and sexually harassing that nice French woman) to still become the script’s unlikely hero. And yet, there’s no denying that this particular moment in global history feels ideal for watching a U.S. goalie fumble the ball.
The 2026 World Cup has been a lightning rod for political controversy thus far. Critics have accused FIFA and the tournament’s host nations of using international spectacle to distract from ongoing human rights concerns, labor abuse issues, and increasingly authoritarian policies in the West. With that in mind, it’s difficult not to view “Victory” through a similarly cynical lens.
Here is a film where fascists literally organize a soccer game for propaganda purposes, hoping to stage a sportsman-like event that will soften the public perception of their brutal regime. The Nazis corrupt the referee, of course, but they’re also remarkably committed to the idea that sports can function as a powerful political distraction. 85 years later, that premise feels less like fiction than it does a recurring quirk of international diplomacy.
Then there are the Eastern European players in “Victory.” One of the movie’s most haunting subplots involves prisoners, who are pulled from labor camps looking half-dead and subsequently folded into Michael Caine‘s soccer team at the Brit’s insistence, but possibly to his squad’s detriment. Watching those scenes while Russia continues its war against Ukraine was genuinely unsettling. The arc is also remarkable considering “Victory” competed at the 12th Moscow International Film Festival that year: a daring choice that still stands out for its layered historical meaning decades later.
The moral assumptions surrounding Huston’s film feel entirely different today than they likely did when audiences first encountered it. But what ultimately stayed with me was the realization that “Victory” isn’t really based on a victory at all. As Jim mentioned, this loose remake of 1961’s “Two Half Times in Hell” takes inspiration from the real 1942 Death Match: a mysterious and infamous soccer game held in Nazi-occupied Kyiv, where former professional footballers reportedly defeated a German military team.
The version that entered popular culture after the war was stirring. Oppressed athletes refused to lose, defeated their captors, and became immortal symbols of resistance so strong they demanded to be played by Stallone and Caine. The reality, of course, was messier and more tragic. Check out this thorough explainer on YouTube, which surprisingly traces the team’s origins back to a Ukrainian bakery.
Several Death Match players were later arrested, imprisoned, and killed, though not in the immediate act of public martyrdom that later retellings of their ordeal sometimes suggest. That gap between horrifying fact and escapist fantasy is what makes Huston’s film so fascinating now. As “Victory” imagined an alternate reality where a symbolic triumph produced tangible freedom for POWs, I found myself wondering what the director would make of this film’s legacy if he were alive today.
Would Huston be proud that this baffling story continues to find new audiences during the World Cup? Or, nearly 40 years after his death in 1987, would he be horrified by just how relevant its themes still feel? A movie about displaced Eastern Europeans, and the nasty relationship between spectacle and politics shouldn’t seem so contemporary — but here we are.
If Warner Bros.’ rumored remake of “Victory” ever materializes (it was last discussed pre-pandemic, so my hopes aren’t high), I’d be less interested in another crowd-pleaser than I would a movie that reckons directly with the real men who inspired it. Their tale may not have ended with a packed stadium or liberation. But it’s a sacrifice that deserves darker drama than Stallone dodging a broken arm. —Alison Foreman
“Victory” (1981) is available to rent or buy on VOD.
Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie club:
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