Patton (1970)

The well-wrought and engrossing story of a man who might have been the doom of nations in a time more congenial to his spirit. 8.5/10

George Smith Patton Jr. was an ornery son of a bitch, but he was also the first to admit it. He was a man easily flustered, with a high voice and no sense of public speaking. He carried a pair of ivory-handled revolvers at his side, polished his helmet so thoroughly that it could function as a disconcerting mirror to interlocutors, and riddled his terse vocalizations with as much profanity as was possible without all intelligible meaning being lost. He took no crap, dished much of it out, and believed that defense was the first step towards defeat. If you weren’t attacking, he reasoned, you may as well have been bending over already.

He brought this matchless gusto to the last stage of his career, handing out consistent punishment to the Nazis during the second world war. Asses were kicked, names were taken, and Patton bounced back from near-disaster on several occasions to accomplish feats greater and more astonishing than each previous success. His final triumph was to rush the 3rd Army through harsh winter conditions to relieve the surrounded men of the 101st Airborne, whose legendary holding of the line in the Bastogne has earned them a spot in history to rival Patton’s own. He was a troublemaker and a lunatic, well-loved (at times) even by those who disliked him, and the sort of man who, in a time of swords and horses rather than guns and tanks, might easily have conquered continents in no name but his own.

That’s what Patton is about: the furious dissatisfaction of a great man – even a Great Man – forced to defer to the conventions of small times and the directives of small people. To recount the film’s plot would be superfluous; General Patton (George C. Scott, who earns every dollar they paid him for this and more) swings into situations like the mailed fist of God, gets things done, and blasts onward again leaving only thrilled and outraged chaos in his wake. He gives wargasms, and even those who hate him for it can’t quite bring themselves to make him stop.

Patton‘s approach to all of this is simple enough. The film starts with the now famous speech in front of the enormous American flag, laced with the general’s trademark macho stylings, albeit toned down somewhat for the censors. Then, all of a sudden, we’re in Africa – and so is Patton. He gets things ship-shape there, stomps some Huns, and then leverages that success into permission to invade Sicily. He does, and it is not uneventful; he disregards orders and pushes north to Palermo, conquering it neatly. Then he drives off to the east again to beat Montgomery into Messina. Not for any particularly tactical reason, please understand, but mostly for spite. He manages it – barely.

And so on and so on. I don’t need to tell you about this, honestly. Just read the Wikipedia article and you’ll get the picture. There’s lots of other great stuff that happens along the way, some good and some bad, but I’ll leave that for the interested viewer to discover. It’s all very good, anyway, and there are very few points at which one wishes something else were happening.

There are merits to the film beyond its subject, of course, and it would only be fair to mention them. The acting is uniformly excellent, with Scott’s performance as Patton attaining a status almost as enormous as the man himself. Karl Malden’s turn as Patton’s friend and sometimes opponent Gen. Omar Bradley is also tremendous, though from Malden one should hardly be surprised. He’s still with us, too; turned 95 this year.

It would appear also that no expense was spared in the production of the film’s many battle sequences, and there’s nothing workmanlike or sedate about the way in which these sequences are shot. The winter battles, in particular, have a sort of monstrous beauty to them, and an earlier African engagement with a column of the 10th Panzer division is breathtaking in its scope. That sequence in particular would probably seem more impressive had Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo not been released a month later (October of 1970), but it’s futile to talk of battle sequences in comparison to what was accomplished in Waterloo anyway. It’s like comparing foothills to Everest.

For all of this, though, it’s the little things that make Patton the rousing success that it is. Patton himself is a figure especially congenial to “character moments,” and Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North (in their screenplay; it was actually directed by Franklin J. Shaffner of Planet of the Apes fame) pack the film so full of Patton and his personality that it sometimes becomes exhausting for those of us who are mere mortals rather than reincarnated poet warlords. All the good ones are here, though: charging out of his headquarters to fire on strafing aircraft with his pistol; acting as a profanity-spewing traffic cop to untangle two armored columns trying to pass the same crossroads; an intensely awkward but well-received speech to a ladies’ social club in England; the triumphant entrances into conquered (or, I guess, liberated) cities and towns. It’s quite a picture. No less significant are the spiritual moments, for Patton was also a man of faith. Described by a colleague as a man who “prays on his knees and curses like a sailor,” Patton frequently demonstrates his reliance upon and regard for God, whether through something as subtle as private prayer or as momentous as kneeling to kiss the ring of the bishop of Palermo during the course of his triumph after liberating the city. More troublingly, though, is the possibility that he views his relationship with God as being one of equals; setbacks he sees as impossible, believing unwaveringly that God owes him his destiny and will not do anything to permanently forestall it. He offers up a prayer to God for good weather, declaring to a skeptical chaplain that, given what he knows about his relationship with the Almighty, the prayer is sure to be answered, and quick. What all of this really means is not examined in significant depth, unfortunately, but it can at least be said that Patton is a man who can pray alone and take solace from it even if he also sometimes wields God like a sword when he feels the situation demands it.

The film ends with his dismissal and seeming disgrace, but it does not go so far as to show his accidental death only a few months after the end of the war. It is profoundly disturbing to consider that this most ferocious of warriors should have perished as a result of a something as banal as a car accident after having pounded his way through two continents of blood-drenched hell, and I can understand the rationale for not even mentioning it in passing (though it is foreshadowed occasionally). Still, for those dedicated to the true history of the man the omission may be irritating. It was covered in The Last Days of Patton, though, a TV movie sequel to Patton in which Scott reprised the role that brought him so much acclaim. I haven’t seen that, unfortunately, so I can’t comment upon it.

All in all it’s a terrific film – it didn’t win seven Academy Awards for nothing. There’s a good deal of elaborate war violence and snarling brutishness from Patton, but of sex there is nothing and of gore very little. Patton’s staggering complexity, both as a person and as a character in a film, possibly disqualifies him from being any sort of role model for a younger viewer, but he does offer an excellent opportunity for a discussion of warrior ethics and the ways in which one may (or may not) virtuously approach the battlefield. Patton is one of the great war films and a tremendous character study besides, and I would recommend it without reservation to virtually anyone.