Patton Review (1970) (Throwback Thursday #5)
Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
Writer: Francis Ford Coppola, Edmund H. North
Starring: George C. Scott, Karl Malden
Release Date: February 4, 1970
This week’s Throwback Thursday Film of the Week is pulling double duty. It comes in at number 8 on my Top 10 War Movies Worth Watching This Memorial Day list, so it felt right to make it this week’s feature as we count down to the holiday. If you haven’t seen Patton, Memorial Day weekend is the perfect time to fix that.
There’s a moment in the opening minutes of Patton that tells you everything you need to know about what kind of film you’re about to watch. General George S. Patton Jr. walks out in full dress uniform, ribbons and medals stacked to his chin, pearl-handled revolvers at each hip, and addresses his troops in front of an American flag so enormous it swallows the entire screen behind him. He tells us Americans love a winner and won’t tolerate a loser. He uses language that was startling in 1970 and remains bracing today. The speech runs six minutes and by the time it’s over you know exactly who this man is. The remaining two hours and forty-six minutes are just the proof.
Patton isn’t really a war film in the traditional sense. It’s a character study that happens to take place during the largest military conflict in human history, and it works because Franklin J. Schaffner and writers Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North never once tell you what to think about the man at the center of it. They show you General George S. Patton Jr. in all his brilliance, vanity, profanity, occasional cruelty, and genuine genius, and then they step back and let you sort it out yourself. That restraint is rarer than you’d think in Hollywood, and it’s a big part of why the film still holds up more than fifty years later.
The story follows Patton through the North African campaign of 1943, through Sicily, through the liberation of France and into Germany. It covers his tactical brilliance and his catastrophic self-inflicted wounds in equal measure. The famous slapping incident, where Patton strikes a soldier suffering from shell shock in a field hospital and calls him a coward, is handled without commentary. The film doesn’t defend it and doesn’t condemn it. It just shows it, the same way it shows everything else about the man. You’re left to decide whether his results justify his methods, and the film is smart enough to know that’s not a question with a clean answer.
Roger Ebert put it well when he described the film as a hard-line glorification of the military ethic personified by a man whose flaws found their ideal theater in battle. That’s exactly right, and it’s why the people who tried to read Patton as some kind of anti-war satire when it came out in 1970 got it completely wrong. This isn’t a film that’s secretly criticizing its subject. It genuinely admires Patton’s genius while being completely honest about the damage that genius left in its wake. Those two things coexist in the film the same way they coexisted in the real man.
None of it works without George C. Scott, and what Scott does here is one of the great performances in American cinema. He doesn’t impersonate Patton or do an impression of the historical record. He just becomes him, completely and without visible effort. There’s no seam in the performance anywhere. Scott was famously offered the role after Burt Lancaster, Rod Steiger, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, and John Wayne all passed on it, and it is genuinely impossible to imagine any of them in the part. Scott was the only actor who could have done this, and the Academy agreed, giving him the Best Actor Oscar that he then refused to accept on principle because he didn’t believe in competitive awards. The Academy gave it to him anyway. That stubbornness, that absolute refusal to play the game on anyone else’s terms, is itself very Patton of him.
Karl Malden as General Omar Bradley deserves more credit than he usually gets in conversations about this film. Bradley is Patton’s long-suffering counterpart, a man who understands Patton better than almost anyone, admires him genuinely, and keeps getting handed the chaos that Patton leaves behind. Malden plays the role with a quiet steadiness that earns its own kind of respect, and his scenes with Scott have a warmth and tension that you don’t often find in war films. These are two men who genuinely like each other and are deeply at odds about what the job demands. Neither one wins those arguments, and the film is honest about that.
The battle sequences are impressive without being the point. Schaffner staged them with real scale and clarity, but Patton was never going to live or die on its action sequences. It lives on its central character and the question that never leaves the film: is this man someone we should admire? He wins wars. He pushes men past the limits of human endurance and expects gratitude for it. He believes in reincarnation and is completely serious about it. He is simultaneously the most indispensable and most difficult man in the Allied command. The film doesn’t resolve that tension because the real history didn’t either.
Patton won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Scott’s refused performance. It deserved all of them. It’s long, it’s demanding, and it asks you to spend nearly three hours with a man who is genuinely hard to categorize. That’s exactly what makes it worth your time.
Patton gets a 4 out of 5 stars: COMMENDABLE.
Get ready to watch some movies this Memorial Day weekend by browsing through my Top 10 War Movies Worth Watching This Memorial Day. And while you’re at it, check out my review of Midway from 2019. Read past installments of Throwback Thursday by clicking here.
Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at the Vortex Effect forums.
