For retail corporations, the football World Cup is a quadrennial opportunity to flog tie-in products: branded drinks, breakfast cereals, video games. The movie business would love to have a slice of the action and at least one film about the sport is usually released ahead of the tournament. For Brazil 2014, it’s Next Goal Wins, a documentary by Mike Brett and Steve Jamison that follows the attempts of American Samoa, the team that suffered the record 31-0 defeat against Australia in 2001, to qualify for this year’s contest.
In football movies, though, one kind of defeat is almost always guaranteed. Goal! – a trilogy about a fictional player that was released either side of the 2006 World Cup – was so unsuccessful that it had been relegated to a DVD-only release by the third instalment. The main reason that this sport has struggled to spawn cinematic classics is that the potential market is fragmented and partisan. While most of the globe can identify with James Bond or Buzz Lightyear, a majority of women – and of Americans – remain indifferent to men kicking balls. A further difficulty: even after months in the gym, an Equity member won’t look plausibly like a football star. Michael Sheen is tremendous as Brian Clough in The Damned United (2009) but the actors playing the manager’s Leeds United players look as if they’d struggle to beat a bunch of nuns.
Sidestepping these problems, Next Goal Wins is, for me, one of the best films about football. It’s a documentary – any playing we see is real – and as American Samoa have practically never won a game, everyone will root for them. Because they are also fielding football’s first transgender international player and have a coach who has taken the job for sombre personal reasons, it will be easy to persuade people with no interest in the game that the film goes beyond football.
Indeed, the key to success in this field may be to include as little match-play as possible. Among my front-three favourite football films is the 1939 curiosity The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (available in a digitally restored print on DVD). A player is murdered on the pitch during a charity fixture and although the football is authentic – filmed, poignantly, at the final game played by the 1938 Arsenal team before the Second World War – the director Thorold Dickinson is, in essence, making a detective film, with the stadium and changing rooms serving as classic locked rooms.
In the back of one shot, there’s a newspaper poster announcing Hitler’s ambitions. His enactment of those ambitions forms the background to the movie generally considered to wear the number-one jersey among football films: John Huston’s Escape to Victory (1981), in which Michael Caine captains an Allied prisoner-of-war team, including some incarcerated professionals, against the Germans in a grudge match.
Three key British 20th-century events are combined in that traditional German-baiting chant: “Two world wars and one World Cup!” Escape to Victory is both a fine football film and a great war movie, which does not cheapen historical reality: Caine puts some concentration camp inmates in his squad in the hope of saving them from the gas chambers. However, Huston’s solution to the problem of convincing action – casting real footballers including Brazil’s Pelé and England’s Bobby Moore as POWs – proves problematic. Michael Caine, playing a man who once played for West Ham and England, doesn’t remotely look as if he could have done, while Moore, who actually did represent those teams, is too far into retirement to come across like a plausible footballer.
Generally, football plays better on grass than on screen and the trick is to keep the characters off the pitch if possible. ITV’s Footballers’ Wives (2002-2006) was a hit because it sensibly included more wiving than footballing and Paul Weiland’s charming film Sixty Six (2006), in which a young boy’s bar mitzvah coincides with the England v West Germany final, is more domestic than sporting. The two best films about women footballers – Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and She’s the Man (2006) – also use the game to tackle the bigger issue of discrimination. Next Goal Wins, though, does the double by being interesting to football fans but not exclusively so.
Identical twins
Alan Bennett’s recent nomination, in an 80th-birthday TV interview, of Philip Roth as a favourite writer caused some surprise. But I have long been struck by an affinity between the writers, which was confirmed by Roth’s own recent octogenarian tribute show on BBC1. Each has repeatedly used his birthplace – Leeds and Newark – as a source of inspiration. Roth has written three novels featuring characters called “Philip Roth”, including two of them in Operation Shylock; Bennett’s trio of plays with “Alan Bennett” in the cast list includes a pair of them in The Lady in the Van.
Both have written works in which the central character is, in essence, a penis: Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Bennett’s Kafka’s Dick. And Kafka, a Bennett obsession, also haunts Roth’s The Prague Orgy. Roth has been a gag in The Simpsons, Bennett in Family Guy. So, apparently unlikely literary twins prove to be nearly identical.
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