Goalie who saved his soul
How Germany’s Bert Trautmann — reviled for fighting for Hitler — became a hero by putting his neck on the line to win the FA Cup
The Keeper (15) Verdict: Absorbing sports biopic ★★★★✩
Bert trautmann was the German paratrooper who became a prisoner-of-war and then manchester City’s goalkeeper.
At first reviled for his nazi background, he was eventually lionised by english football fans, especially manchester City supporters.
City’s first-choice goalie from 1949 to 1964, he will for ever be the only man in history with an Iron Cross, an Fa Cup Winner’s medal and an OBe.
Yet it wasn’t his unique haul of gongs or contribution to anglo-German relations which gave trautmann an everlasting place in football lore.
no, it was the fact that, in making one of his trademark courageous saves at an opponent’s feet in the 1956 Fa Cup final, he broke his neck.
after a few perfunctory dabs of the trainer’s magic sponge, he then carried on for the last 16 minutes of the game, making several more saves to preserve City’s 3-1 lead. admittedly, he didn’t know he’d broken his neck, even though his head was hanging to one side like an action man savaged by a dog.
He wasn’t told for another two days that he’d been a hair’s breadth away from paralysis and possible death.
Yet that wasn’t the worst news he received in the summer of 1956. Just a few weeks later he got a phone call, telling him that his son, six-year- old John, had been knocked over and killed while running across the road from an ice-cream van.
I know trautmann’s story well because I once interviewed him. I also reviewed Catrine Clay’s very good 2010 biography of him. all of which made me fret slightly as I took my seat at a screening of the Keeper. What if it was no good? Sporting biopics can sometimes be a bit clunky, and trautmann — who died in 2013, aged 89 — definitely did not deserve clunk.
What a relief and a pleasure, then, to report that the Keeper, is a terrific, big-hearted film, whether you like football or not.
true, not all of the footie sequences are entirely convincing. and as Bert’s earthy Lancastrian father-inlaw, John Henshaw gives one of those borderline comedic performances of his — as if he’s just stopped off to do a spot of acting on his way to the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club — that at times feels out of kilter with everything going on around it.
But the German actor David Kross (whose best-known part was as a boy opposite Kate Winslet in the reader, another tale of post- war guilt and redemption) is well cast in the title role.
moreover, the script by robert marciniak, nicholas Schofield and the film’s German director, marcus rosenmuller, generally avoids the pitfalls into which films like this often plunge.
It sensibly shapes the Keeper around trautmann’s relationship with the woman who became his first wife, margaret Friar (engagingly played by
Freya Mavor), making the film as much a love story as a sporting biopic. This anchors the narrative and gives it a clear chronology.
It kicks off in wartime. In St Helens, near Liverpool, Margaret is dancing the night away until an air raid spoils the fun. Meanwhile, Bert is captured by British soldiers. He is sent to a PoW camp in Lancashire, where he undergoes a process of ‘de-Nazification’.
Although, for understandable reasons, the film rather fudges the issue, Trautmann was considered one of those most in need of this ideological cleansing. He had been an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth movement and signed up for active service as soon as he was able.
Rosenmuller shifts the goalposts a few times during the film. In real life, in a forest clearing on the Eastern Front, Trautmann witnessed the brutal murder of dozens of Jews, made to climb into a pit where they were machine-gunned by the SS. Here, the episode is reworked to depict the fate of a single Jewish child as he reclaims a football. Bert is haunted by the memory.
At the PoW camp, his goalkeeping skills attract the attention of a non-league team, St Helens Town, and when he is offered the chance to be repatriated, he declines.
Jack Friar (Henshaw), who runs St Helens Town, invites Bert to lodge with his family. Margaret, having overcome her initial hostility to the big blond German up the stairs, begins to fall for him.
Soon, he also catches the eye of Manchester City scouts.
THERE are several weighty issues in this film, but Rosenmuller doesn’t treat them too portentously, largely because the romance keeps everything grounded in ordinariness.
Bert is the target of intense anti-German feeling, which dissipates partly thanks to the efforts
of a compassionate Manchester rabbi, but largely because Bert is just so darned good and brave.
By 1956, even before the FA Cup final that immortalised him, he is a hero. But then, at the peak of his popularity, he must reconcile the adulation with the harrowing grief following John’s death.
Again, the film fudges what happened next. The Trautmanns went on to have two more sons, but Bert saw little of them as they were growing up and, though there is no hint of it here, the marriage didn’t survive.
The Keeper can perhaps be accused of benevolence towards its subject. But this is no hagiography. It is a passion project on which Rosenmuller had been working long before Trautmann died, and it deserves to be seen for lots of reasons. Chiefly, because it truly is a heck of a story.