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.