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George C Scott triumphs as Patton in this excellent World War Two biopic |
Director: Franklin J Schaffner
Cast: George C Scott (General George S Patton), Karl Malden
(General Omar Bradley), Michael Bates (General Bernard Montgomery), Edward
Binns (Lt General Walter Bedell Smith), Lawrence Dobkin (Colonel Gaston Bell),
John Doucette (General Lucian Truscott), James Edwards (Sgt William Meeks),
Frank Latimore (Lt Colonel Henry Davenport), Richard Münch (General Alfred
Jodl), Morgan Paull (Captain Richard Jenson), Siegfriend Rauch (Captain Oskar Steiger),
Paul Stevens (Lt Colonel Charles Codman), Karl Michael Vogler (Field Marshall
Erwin Rommel), Peter Barkworth (Colonel John Welkin)

Patton is
nominally a war film, but it’s actually an intriguing character piece. It
follows the career of General George S Patton (George C Scott) during the
course of the Second World War. Patton was a soldier’s soldier, a
dyed-in-the-wool military man with a warrior’s instinct and a poet’s soul. The
sort of man who berated men for not wearing proper uniform, then astounded them
with thoughtful reflections on classical history. The film charts his command
in Africa against Rommel, the invasion with Sicily (and feud with British
counterpart Bernard Montgomery), his benching after striking a soldier
suffering from shellshock in a military hospital, and his command of the Third
Army during the Normandy invasion, including his pivotal role in the Battle of
the Bulge.
With a script co-written by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund
North (later president of the Screenwriter’s Guild), Patton was a warts-and-all portrait of one of America’s most famous
generals that came out amidst the country’s growing disillusionment with Vietnam.
It was embraced by both sides of the argument because it very skilfully walks a
tight-rope: for the hawks, there is enough of the “if we had more like him …”
stance. For the doves, the film doesn’t shy away from Patton’s egomania, lack
of tact and love of war (he even strongly advocates immediately turning on
Russia – ‘cos they’ve already got all the men in Europe anyway – which you can
interpret as visionary or insane depending on which side of the fence you are
on).
At the centre of everything, George C Scott is quite simply
a force of nature as Patton – I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is
surely one of the greatest Best Actor winning performances ever. Patton is in
nearly every scene, and even the one’s he’s not in he’s the subject of every
conversation, and Scott totally dominates the movie. You can’t put your finger
on it, but he quite simply becomes
Patton. It’s extraordinary, but the actor totally disappears and you feel you
are watching some remarkable act of resurrection (fitting since Patton had a
profound belief in reincarnation).
Scott’s Patton rages, he shouts, he goes into fits of
childish egomania – but he’s also sensitive, intelligent and poetic. He can
write a touching letter to the bereaved mother of his adjutant, expressing his
sorrow, but also write how tragic it is that he will miss the wars to come.
Scott is ramrod in his posture, and more than embraces the theatricality of
Patton himself – when an adjutant tells the General sometimes his soldiers
don’t know if he’s joking or not, the General softly replies “It’s not
important for them to know. It’s important for me to know”.
It’s easy to eulogise over Scott at the expense of all else
– but the film is so focused on Patton that he is intrinsically linked with the
film’s success. The film is episodic, but every scene tells us something
different about the man. Although since the film starts with one of the
greatest opening scenes in movie history, we feel like we pretty much know him
from the start.
It opens with an enormous American flag, in front of which
Patton emerges in full dress uniform to encourage new soldiers to do their duty
and, most of all, to “remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his
country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” Scott
famously refused to do this scene when told it would open the picture, as he
felt nothing else in his performance could emerge from its shadow (they
eventually told him it would go later in the film – no word on how he responded
when he first saw the film!).
In a nut shell you get the whole movie. Is the giant
American flag ironic or does the film really mean it? Patton is both strangely
terrifying and also awe-inspiring, charisma, determination and force seeping
from every pore of his body. Scott nails every detail of this speech, just as
he nails every other part of the performance, while the camera work reinforces
his mythic status (or his hubris depending on where you stand) as a symbol of
Americana.
Schaffner’s direction of the film is easy to overlook,
largely because it is refreshingly unflashy. It’s superbly professional –not a
single scene falls flat. He marshals each scene with extraordinary effect, and
manages the film’s difficult balancing act of sly satire and hagiography
brilliantly. He also, within an epic canvas, works very well with actors –
there are a host of great cameos in here, not least from Michael Bates as a
preening Montgomery and Edward Binns as an exasperated Bedell Smith. Karl
Malden is the only other really major character as Patton’s junior (later
commanding) officer and he is perfect as thehonest professionalism in contrast
to Patton’s flash.
And the film gives us plenty of Patton’s flash. The man who
loved war and combat, also loved performing – and does so with abundant skill.
But the film isn’t afraid to show his warts: in Sicily he threatens to sack a general
who refuses to risk his men’s lives on a risky operation, primarily motivated
by Patton wanting to reach Messina before Montgomery. Later, when striking the
scared soldier, his actions are tough to watch even as part of you sees his
point about other men having been wounded in the line of duty (the playing of
the soldier as a teary whiner probably doesn’t help). The film never fails to
show that Patton’s worst enemy is his own arrogant lack of thought – he
constantly shoots his mouth off with no thought for the impact.
The film is brilliantly constructed. The photography is
excellent, the editing superbly marshals a long film of many individual scenes
into a story that seems a lot tighter and forward moving than it probably is.
Schaffner makes us feel we go on a clear journey with this character – helped
as well by Jerry Goldsmith’s excellent score that conveys a great deal with
ancient mythic weight, playing off Patton’s own belief in resurrection.
Patton is often
forgotten a bit – but it is a great film, well made, brilliantly balanced,
wonderfully written and directed. And at its centre: what a performance. George
C Scott is simply astoundingly brilliant, completely transformed into the old general.
His Oscar (which Scott declined, thinking awards phony) was as well-deserved as
these things get. A wonderful film, a true epic, and a marvellous character
study of an enigma – it deserves to sit near Lawrence of Arabia in the personal epic stakes (to which it has
more than a few similarities).
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