Winning Points

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

VICTORY

Directed by John Huston Screenplay by Evan Jones and Yabo Yablonsky

Half time at the soccer match: the trailing side troops wearily into the dressing room, down by three points, battered, bruised and certain that their opponents own the referee. The time is World War II, the place is Paris, and these are the underdog's underdogs: a team of P.O.W.s and concentration camp victims, recruited to play the Germans' best and, by their inevitable loss, offer some more spurious proof of Aryan superiority.

But a plot--actually the plot--is a foot. For the underground is literally underground, busily tunneling up into the changing room. If things go right, there will be no humiliating second half to endure: during the rest period the entire team will be spirited away. Good idea --but it reckons without simple psychological fact. In civilian life these chaps were professional athletes, for whom the only wins and losses that counted were on the playing fields. So halfway to freedom somebody says, "Wait a minute, we can beat these guys." Back up the ladder and into the stadium they go, in search of at least a moral victory and, as none of them would express it, an assertion of civilian values--their camp leaders are against cooperating in a propagandizable sporting event, all for the escape--over military necessity.

This blend of The Great Escape (with Sylvester Stallone in Steve McQueen's old role as the prisoner obsessed with getting out) and Rocky (with the whole team playing Stallone's old role) has but one aim: to convert a movie audience--typically composed of individuals lost in private fantasies--into a sports crowd, in which singular preoccupations are submerged in communal joy as the home team is cheered on to a transcendence everyone shares. With Pele doing wondrous tricks on field, and Bill Conti's huge score blasting away underneath John Huston's superb blending of game action with the stadium's increasingly delirious response to it, Victory achieves its goal. Anyone who does not find himself yelling along with the extras should probably have stayed home with his Proust and bitters.

Which is not to imply that all of Victory's simple but highly effective values are to be found in its last half-hour. The funny, smart script does what sports pages do before any big game: provide brisk sketches of the leading participants. Max von Sydow is the German officer who conceives the contest --a gentleman anti-Nazi who thinks nations should settle their disputes in games. Michael Caine, player-coach of the Allied team, is working class and quite bedeviled by the Oxbridge types who run the escape committee and deplore people who play boys' games when there's a war on. They don't seem to realize that most of their plans for sneaking out are also boys' games. As always, these two stars are marvelously professional, and even Stallone's ego is more or less under control here. As for Pele, no one asks him to act. He is required merely to be what he has always been: a magical figure. That he is, and he suits a movie that finally exerts its own kind of magic, not subtle, but totally winning.

--By Richard Schickel

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