PATTON (1970)

The opening moments of Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton remain perhaps the most famous, and certainly its most commented-on: a gigantic American flag fills the screen, and hubbub fills the soundtrack. An offscreen voice calls “ten-hut!” and there’s silence; then General George S. Patton (George C. Scott) strides—no, marches—into view. He is far smaller, in Schaffner’s framing, than we might expect for such a larger-than-life figure; Old Glory, though, is absurdly big, and many writers compare the effect to Pop Art in its assertive simplicity.

There’s a bugle and a salute from Patton; then a medium-long shot of him is followed by a peculiar extreme close-up which shows nearly all of his saluting hand, but only a quarter of his face. Perhaps this is an indication of how difficult it will be to get to know the man behind the soldier?

Schaffner now cuts to Patton’s other hand, gripping his swagger stick, and then we see his medals, his pistol, his helmet insignia—all the accoutrements of his military role, but still very little to suggest there is anything here but a soldier. No emotion, no words until he begins his celebrated speech (delivered in real life, but rewritten for the film by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North): “I want you 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.”

The scene tells us everything we need to know—or does it? Certainly, it encapsulates one view of Patton, the forthright, uncompromising soldier dedicated to the pursuit of victory. And it has become so associated with Patton—as indeed has Scott’s performance—that when Joseph Sargent’s MacArthur (1977) opens with a flag and a speech from Gregory Peck as the titular general, or when Tom Cruise addresses his troops in front of the Stars & Stripes in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), we’re surely intended to think straight away of this moment.

But if the Patton we see in this scene is supremely confident in his abilities and his rightness, Patton the movie is not, or at least not all the time. It would be utterly wrong to think of it as “revisionist” (or specifically “anti-war”) because it certainly is a celebration of the real Patton. But it would be equally wrong to see it as hagiography. While it is not overtly critical of Patton’s worldview, it does not exclude others’ either. Patton isn’t unsympathetic but nor is he quite sympathetic, let alone a conventional hero; he’s driven, obsessive, and slightly weird. His misjudgements, and the way that he was sidelined more than he would have liked in some of World War II’s major military actions, are in many ways the focus of the film more than his achievements. Patton may present its subject as a great man in some ways, but decidedly not in the sense of the “great man theory” of history.

Given Patton’s relatively large budget and its subject matter, audiences in 1970 might have expected another war epic like The Longest Day (1962), and indeed 20th Century Fox’s Darryl F. Zanuck was instrumental in having both films made. But what they got was something much more like David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a movie where the lavish spectacle of war is there only as a context for a much more personal portrait of a complicated man. As with Lawrence, we are left with as many questions as answers; and as with Lawrence, an immensely long film (about three hours apiece though Lawrence is slightly longer than Patton) is held together by one of the greatest biographical screen performances ever.

After Patton’s opening speech, the scene changes to Tunisia in 1943, and a defeat for the Allies. Dead men and animals litter the dust; a scorpion crawls over a scorched body by a burned-out vehicle; scavengers roam. It’s a far cry from the lofty exhortations of the speech—are we already getting the sense that Patton’s ideals and reality don’t quite match up?—and tellingly the officer we now meet, contemplating the carnage, is not Patton himself but General Omar N. Bradley (Karl Malden). He’ll be the second most important character in the movie after Scott’s Patton.

Tellingly, too, after depicting Bradley at the battlefield the film moves to showing Patton in Morocco, inspecting troops in parade dress far from the front line, though he protests that “I’d prefer to be in Tunisia fighting the Germans”. A Moroccan government minister (Albert Dumortier) presents Patton with a medal and remarks that “the lions in their dens tremble at his approach”, a comment which must be intended to come across as ironic to the viewer even if not meant as such by the character.

Given a command in North Africa, Patton soon asserts the strict discipline that will be one of his hallmarks—and his eventual partial undoing. He also comes, quite soon, to develop a rivalry with the British General (later Field Marshal) Bernard Montgomery (Michael Bates), which is possibly exacerbated by a more general Anglophobia and persists through the invasions of Sicily in 1943 and France in 1944. While this is vexatious for Patton, however, his career is more seriously derailed by an incident in 1943 where he slaps a soldier suffering from combat fatigue. (In fact, there were two such incidents, trimmed to one for the film.)

This and the subsequent apology that Patton is forced to make to his men are important turning points in the film as story elements—to Patton’s superiors they were further evidence that he could be a loose cannon, and he was given some frustratingly minor assignments thereafter. But they are vital, too, in illuminating a central aspect of his character. In Patton’s formative years, what later became known as “shell shock” and then “combat fatigue”—what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—had often been regarded simply as cowardice, and although by the time of WWII the US military was far more enlightened on the subject, Patton is incapable of moving with the times. “Battle fatigue”, he says, is a “free ride” for “yellowbellies”.

Just as with T.E. Lawrence, we have a strong sense that Patton is never really going to be happy because he’s living in the wrong place and time. He believed, quite literally, in reincarnation and that he had fought in battles of the past; the general’s biographer Carlo d’Este (in 1995’s A Genius for War) suggests that he saw himself as a modern version of the American Civil War’s Confederates (although Patton himself did not come from the South, one of his grandparents had been a Confederate colonel).

He was fascinated by the idea of dying in battle, d’Este suggests. One of the German characters that appear briefly in the movie, Captain Steiger (Siegfried Rauch), describes him as “a 16th-century man”. He is depicted by Schaffner and Scott as proud and ambitious, intolerant of weakness and excessively preoccupied with appearance, but he is not just the ramrod-straight general of stereotype: he’s insecure at the same time as being self-assured, and emotional on occasions. In short, though he is highly intelligent and articulate, he is thoroughly out of place in the rational, technocratic, media-aware army of the 20th century.

The writers of Patton develop the general’s character carefully through individual episodes revealing different facets of his nature, occasionally with a little humour. But a great deal of the credit for creating him must go to Scott in a performance that, as d’Este points out, for many people has become the enduring image of the real Patton: it is Scott’s face we think of when we see the general’s name, Scott’s growly delivery (and not Patton’s rather high-pitched voice) in which we imagine him speaking.

Many others, including John Wayne and Burt Lancaster, had been offered the part, and Lancaster might have been pretty good at it, but it’s difficult to believe anyone could have done better than Scott. It is surely his greatest screen performance and one he was made for: superficially you might occasionally be reminded of the crazed general in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), but the character whom Scott’s Patton really resembles is the strictly religious Midwestern father in Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), a complete fish out of water as he navigates the west coast’s sex industry. He is nothing like Patton on paper, of course, but his underlying responses to the situations in which he finds himself may not be so different.

Though nearly all attention goes to Scott, Malden (also billed above the title) delivers an almost equally fine performance of understated conviction—very unfairly denigrated by some critics—as Bradley, who is initially Patton’s junior but later promoted over him, and who is his utter opposite: quiet, bespectacled, genial, devoid of braggadocio even when he is being assertive, seemingly determined to make himself unobtrusive most of the time while Patton demands the limelight. Malden’s Bradley is credible, hinting just to the right degree at inner strengths; for all his seeming modesty he is no pushover. Bradley also consulted on the film, which is partially based on the first of his two memoirs.

Scott reprised his role for the made-for-TV sequel The Last Days of Patton (1986)—rather disconcertingly because (after the predictable opening flag) the action takes place only months later, yet Scott of course is almost two decades older. This does, in fact, make him more or less the correct age to play the Patton of the immediate postwar period when Last Days is set; but his performance in the original Patton is so unforgettable that he seems far too old by comparison in the sequel. Ron Berglas, meanwhile, plays the much younger, early-20th-century Patton in flashback scenes which seem rather like padding.

At first, The Last Days of Patton has some interest, concentrating on Patton’s arguments with his superiors about the de-Nazification of Germany (he argues that if those civil servants who had only paid lip service to the Nazi regime are all fired, there will be no Germans left to run the country), and Delbert Mann’s directorial flair brings many scenes alive. But the story of Patton’s car accident in 1945 and his subsequent death is not intrinsically interesting— it’s an anticlimactically mundane end for such a legendary man—and the film spends far too long on it. The crash is also the subject of Brass Target (1978), which puts it at the centre of a conspiracy; I’ve not been able to see that film, although the casting of George Kennedy as Patton is certainly promising.

Another big star, Kirk Douglas, took the part of Patton for René Clément’s Is Paris Burning? (1966), where Glenn Ford played Bradley in an even smaller cameo. But neither makes much impact (Gert Fröbe as the German military governor of Paris, torn between following orders and humane good sense, is by far the film’s standout), and again there is an age problem: though Douglas in Is Paris Burning? was actually closer to Patton’s age than Scott was in Patton, he simply looks too young.

In lauding Scott we should not, of course, forget that Patton is also a Schaffner film…and for that matter a Francis Ford Coppola one. Coppola had been hired to work on it in 1965 (around the same time as he was co-writing Is Paris Burning?) and it then went through multiple rewrites before Scott insisted on reinstating Coppola’s work. He shared the writing credit with North, but ideas that would later interest Coppola in his own films can be detected quite clearly here—there are obvious linkages between the old-school Patton and Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972), for example (a film where Schaffner also worked on the screenplay), while Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979) is a kind of nightmare Patton. The general’s idiosyncrasies might have something in common with those of the inventor played by Jeff Bridges in Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), while the aesthetic of the disastrously bad Megalopolis (2024) and its intermeshing of past and present would surely have appealed to both the historian and the orator in Patton.

Where Schaffner is concerned, the similarities between Patton and his other films are not as immediately apparent, but they are there. It is a stretch to say that there is a recognisable “Schaffner style” or a Schaffner kind of film—he’s not an auteur in that sense—and indeed critic Pauline Kael thought him the kind of plain, “literal-minded” director who inherently lacked much of a signature.

But there are certainly threads that connect many of his movies. The original Planet of the Apes (1968) is probably his most famous but it’s Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), The Boys From Brazil (1978) and Papillon (1973) that have the strongest resemblances to Patton, most notably in that they are all dominated by male characters in institutional or organisational settings, and (in rather different ways) deal with the past and the passage of time. (All these traits also apply to The Godfather, while his jury-room drama 12 Angry Men for TV in 1954 is yet another exploration of male characters in a highly rule-based setting.)

Perhaps the similarities are most obvious in the case of Nicholas and Alexandra, Schaffner’s film about Russia’s last royal rulers. Both this and Patton are long movies of around three hours telling stories that span a long period in distinct episodes; both feature a proud and unbending leader; both are built around big set pieces interspersed with smaller-scale scenes; in both, there is care taken to cast actors who bear some resemblance to their historical characters (for example Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky in Nicholas and Alexandra, as well as Nicholas himself; compare Bradley, Montgomery and Patton himself in the 1970 movie).

The history lessons (for instance a conversation between Lenin and Trotsky) may be a bit more blatant in Nicholas and Alexandra, but there is also a striking thematic link: the Queen Mother in that film calls Russia an “18th-century country in a 20th-century world”, while the German officer Steiger describes Patton as “a romantic warrior lost in contemporary times”. When Nicholas says of his people “they’re children and they need a Tsar, they need tradition”, he could easily be Patton speaking of his soldiers.

The same idea of an old way of life trying to exist in a new reality is also key to The Boys From Brazil, based on Ira Levin’s novel about a group of ex-Nazis striving to regenerate the Third Reich. Here, as well, there is a resemblance between the characters of Mengele (played by Gregory Peck) and Patton: both vain men, to some extent, renegades, living in the past, leading by fear (as does the Tsar Nicholas) and working for organisations which turn against them. Like Patton, The Boys From Brazil also features multiple international settings, makes much of local colour (in this case Paraguay), and injects comic moments (between Laurence Olivier’s Nazi-hunter Lieberman and his landlord) into an otherwise serious story.

In Papillon, Schaffner’s adaptation of Henri Charrière’s French prison memoir, the similarities might seem fewer—but leaving the very different subject matter aside, it’s easy to detect many of the same directorial interests again: the male milieu, the local colour, the humour (e.g. the crocodile-catching scene). It could also be considered that, while Papillon and The Boys From Brazil appear to have two protagonists apiece and Patton only one, the character of Bradley is in many ways more than just support, and as important to the story as Patton himself; Patton is at least partly a study in contrasting approaches to leadership.

Kael, for all her criticism of Schaffner, does acknowledge that he is capable of handling grand spectacle, and that is certainly on display in Patton in the relatively small amount of screen time that depicts the war being fought. But Schaffner is also intensely attentive to detail, something that’s easy to overlook when Scott is so consistently dominant and attention-grabbing. Shots are carefully constructed; see, for example, the complex use of light and shadow in the scene about 18 minutes in, where Patton’s followed down a corridor by two soldiers, or the imagery of military vehicles in the desert dusk.

Bigger scenes are often expertly choreographed—for example, the clash of two military bands at Messina in Sicily or the beautifully filmed Moroccan parade-ground scene, where the colour and order contrasts tellingly with the faded chaos we’ve just witnessed on the Tunisian battle site. Jerry Goldsmith’s musical score also helps to tie together the long film; it’s essentially conservative Hollywood music and quite heavily reliant on military motifs, but it’s much superior to his overdone music for MacArthur or for that matter Allyn Ferguson’s bombastic score for The Last Days of Patton, which nearly ruins some sequences.

Patton won seven Academy Awards, including the ‘Best Picture’ accolade as well as statuettes for Schaffner, for the screenwriters, and for Scott (although Scott refused his ‘Best Actor’ award, calling the Oscars a “meat parade”). It also won for art direction, editing, and sound, while Goldsmith was nominated for his music, Fred J. Koenekamp for his cinematography, and Alex Weldon for special effects. In the US, it was the year’s fourth-highest-grossing film, slightly behind Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), with which it was re-released a little later on a double bill.

That combination may seem bizarre, given the two films’ wildly different approaches to the subjects of war and the army, but remarkably Patton seemed to be appreciated by hawks and doves alike. Supporters of the military saw Patton as a hero; the anti-war (and there were plenty of them in 1970, with Vietnam raging) saw Schaffner’s film as confirmation of their worst fears about intransigence at the highest levels of command. One critic at the time, A.D Murphy of Variety, pinpointed the source of this appeal: “Patton is one hell of a war picture, perhaps one of the most remarkable of its type ever made”, which “forges a daring and very successful path between cliché heroics and more contemporary put-down.”

Other critical views were more mixed. Vincent Canby in The New York Times found it “consistently fascinating” but felt it idolised Patton too much; Kael thought it simply copped out by not offering us enough information on which to base a judgement of the character (were his eccentricities and his high opinion of himself justified?). Roger Ebert described it as “one of the most uncluttered of war movies, devoid of side plots, colourful supporting characters and ‘human interest’”, but didn’t see this as entirely positive.

Unlike some of the critics, President Nixon was a huge fan, seeing Patton at least six times (and no doubt identifying with the hard-done-by general as well as with the invocation of the American spirit). It would be no surprise if Patton resonated with President Trump, too: “The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans”, says the general. This is one aspect of the film that can seem extremely hawkish, more so than other war movies, which tend to at least cursorily acknowledge the tragedy and destructiveness of war before they get on with the exciting blowing-stuff-up bits: for Patton’s title character, it’s all about winning.

But Patton isn’t necessarily saying that the general was right about this. The film is much less adulatory about Patton himself than its reputation might suggest; sure, there’s a little affection in the way he is presented, but nothing approaching unqualified praise. As Variety’s Murphy observed, it’s perfectly possible to see Patton as a chronicle of flaws if that’s what you want to see.

And is it a war movie in the normal sense at all, anyway? Maybe not. Of course, war is its setting, but there is very little actual combat—insofar as the war itself is the topic, Patton is more about strategy, and even more than that it is about personality. It is the story of a man who finds that the values of his world are changing around him, and who’s unwilling to change himself, but who still wants to make a difference on his own terms. (Of the subtitles given to the movie for different releases, Lust for Glory sums it up better than Salute to a Rebel.) If it were not based on a real person who happened to be a general it could very easily be set just as effectively in a milieu of politics or business, for example.

Is it an epic? It’s certainly epic in length, but again, the large-scale, cast-of-thousands scenes are not the really important ones, and arguably, if Patton has a major flaw, it’s that Schaffner and the writers haven’t quite figured out how to combine these with the much smaller-scale, more personal scenes where the real drama unfolds. But one thing it never is, not for a single moment, is boring. And once again, this has much more to do with its portrayal of Patton (the man) than with its depiction of war. Scott’s magnetic performance, as well as Malden’s sometimes underrated one, are the keys to the film’s endless repeat value.

It’s aged far better than many films of its time, too, perhaps because it was already set in the past and makes no overt attempt to draw parallels between the 1940s and 1970 (though again, they can be detected if you want them to be there): it still feels fresh. Schaffner’s direction is occasionally flamboyant—as in that opening scene, of course—but more often quietly competent, like Coppola’s writing; too much flashiness would get tiresome over three hours. And it isn’t needed when Scott and the character he plays come across so powerfully in one of the most engrossing screen biographies ever made.

USA | 1970 | 172 MINUTES | 2.20:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • GERMAN • FRENCH • RUSSIAN • ARABIC • ITALIAN

Cast & Crew

director: Franklin J. Schaffner.
writers: Francis Ford Coppola & Edmund H. North (based on the book ‘Patton: Ordeal and Triumph’ by Ladislas Farago and the memoir ‘A Soldier’s Story’ by Omar N. Bradley).
starring: George C. Scott, Karl Malden, David Bauer, Edward Binns, John Doucette, Michael Strong, Peter Barkworth, Lawrence Dobkin, Paul Stevens, Morgan Paull, Stephen Young & James Edwards.