Time.news – Black and white images from distant Sweden, then others in colour, rather faded (painful, for us Italians, those of World Cup Mexico ’70) to miracol show on football fields. The art of what with Maradona is considered the greatest footballer of all time, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known as Pelé, is immortalized on ancient and shabby films. Of her over a thousand goals, there are relatively few images that remain of her, most of which come from the three World Cups that she played and won (1958, 1962 and 1970).
To certify his unrivaled class there are the testimonies of those who had the good fortune to see him play (for his entire career in Brazil and then, for two years, in the Cosmos of New York) and videos, some amateurish, shot on Brazilian fields where, with Santos dispensed magic and gave football lessons to their opponents. Curiously, therefore, perhaps the most famous image of footballer Pele – besides the goal with ‘sombrero’ for Sweden in 1958 – is the one immortalized by John Huston in a 1981 film, ‘Escape for victory’, where the Brazilian champion, obviously nicknamed ‘o Rei at home, she stars alongside Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine and Max Von Sidow.
Pele plays an American prisoner of war in a Nazi concentration camp During the Second World War. Together with his fellow prisoners, he agrees to challenge a team supported by the German government and designs a daring escape plan to be implemented in the interval between the first and second half of the match. Despite the dramatic situation (in the field against the Germans there are also Jews brought in specially from the concentration camps for this match) the group gets caught up in the desire for revenge and the desire to beat the Nazis on the ball field, so they return in the field. The climax of the film, which remains etched in the memory, where reality and fiction merge, is the bicycle kick with which Pelé (alias Captain Luis Fernandez) deserves the standing ovation of the stadium and the applause of an improbable Nazi officer (Max von Sydow), unable to contain the enthusiasm for that play.
In recent years, cinema has begun to tell the story of sports champions with biopics or ‘auteur’ documentaries. And of course Pelé could not be missing. To celebrate the most famous footballer of all time Jeff and Michael Zimbalist made a biopic in 2016, an American production examining the beginnings of the legend simply titled ‘Pelé: Birth of a Legend’. Leonardo Carvalho and Kevin de Paula play the champion at ages 9 and 17when he was nicknamed ‘Dico’ before assuming the nickname that made him immortal, retracing the genesis of his sporting career which coincides with the birth of the Brazilian national identity which followed the ‘tragedy’ of the defeat against Uruguay at the Maracana stadium at the 1950 home World Cup.
After 1977, when he retired from football with a FIFA-certified tally of 1,281 goals in 1,363 games, Pelé starred in a few films at home, including Anselmo Duarte’s 1979 drama ‘Os Trombadinhas’, of which he was also the author of the subject. dfter the success of the film ‘Escape to Victory’, in 1983 he returned to work with John Hustn, this time only as an actor, in the film ‘A Minor Miracle‘ never arrived in Italy. In 1986 he wrote and starred in the comedy ‘Os Trapalhoes eo Rei do Futebol’, while the following year he returned to the US to play himself in ‘Hotshot’, the story of a soccer player who turns to ‘o Rei to become the best . His last appearance as an actor dates back to 1989, in the Brazilian film ‘Solidao, Uma Linda Història de Amor’. In chronological order, the latest film dedicated to the champion is ‘Pelé: the King of Soccer (Pelé: the King of Soccer)’, a documentary by David Tryhorn and Ben Nicholas.