Men in Movement

Goal! Association Football is the proper name of an anything-but-proper game. America calls it soccer, and plays it rather poorly. The rest of the world calls it football, and plays it with a passion that rises to fever heat in midsummer, when 16 of the world's top teams assemble to run off the world series of soccer. Last summer the series was held in England, and it produced some of the most brutal and brilliant football of the decade.

The story of the tournament, photographed in color by 117 cameras, is now told in a two-hour movie that might with equal aptness be considered a sports film or a war documentary. As a sports film, it will principally appeal to the soccer sect--a rapidly enlarging minority in the U.S., where two twelve-team "major leagues" are currently being organized. As a war documentary, it will command the empathy of any spectator still animal enough to admire the aspect of men in sudden, intricate, continuous, beautiful and aggressive movement. Indeed, it might safely be said that Goal! will provide kicks for everybody.

In the early reels, the other teams concentrate ruthlessly on eliminating Brazil, the defending champion, and the only way to do that is to eliminate Pele (pronounced Pehleh), the Babe Ruth of soccer, a man who dribbles as daintily as a woman knits and then with a kick that could fell a rhino drives the ball into the net so fast the eye cannot follow it. Portugal finally does the dirty deed with a ferocious mousetrap: the man in front of Pele kicks his knee at the same instant the man behind him kicks his ankle. He goes down like a speared panther, and the focus shifts to Eusebio, the green-skinned, inscrutable Portuguese superstar.

In a dazzling exhibition of footloose genius, Eusebio sinks North Korea by personally pile-driving four goals into the net. But in the English team, Eusebio meets rather more than his match. No genius in this lot, but the English are drilled and driven by a demonic will to win. So is West Germany, and in the final game of the tournament the two put on an awesome display of pedal operatics. They leap like gin-crazed kangaroos, block like Green Bay Packers, swing their heads like sledge hammers, flip like tumblers and boot the ball 30 yards upfield while standing on their heads in midair. Amazing that at the end of the game, which England wins (4-2) in overtime, the players all look as fresh as when they trotted on the field. The spectator feels like a boiled sweat sock.

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