Patton (1970): Eitan's Take

I'm a huge fan of the Call of Duty series of video games; I think anyone who grew up with fighter jet posters on their walls and a lump in their throat every time they visited the Air and Space Museum finds themselves magnetically drawn to those first-person WWII epics. The one problem with Call of Duty 2, my favorite in the series, is that you have to play the North African campaign in order to beat the game. To those who skim the pages of history, the campaign in Tunisia remains something of a mystery. Why were we there? What did Hitler want from those sun-stroked deserts? If the whole campaign was basically fought with tanks, couldn't those resources have gone elsewhere? These questions, and the general grimness of the Tunisian desert, are the reasons why Patton is not as flawless a film as I remember it being. The real meat of the war was the majestic fights among snow-capped French trees and in the rolling hillsides of Belgium. We certainly can't change history and take the Africa story out of Patton's career, but the mundane slog of the first half of the film has failed to hold up over the years.

This is not to say that Patton is a disappointment or a bore. It's very far from that. And while it is perhaps one of the most straight-laced Best Picture winners ever -- it certainly lacks the colorful flamboyance and rhetorical flourishes of Lawrence of Arabia -- it is clearly a film as gritty, odd, tough, and passionate as its subject. General Patton was many things: a rebel, a genius, a raving psycho, a grandstander, a shameless self-promoter, a brave man with few hesitations. George C. Scott's thunderous, performance captures all that and more. He stomps through scenes, cackles, plots and speechifies, and generally acts like the brilliant wart on the US Army's butt that he really was. Comparing it to his performance as Gen. Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, it's hard not to feel like Scott was more or less typecast; then again, maybe this is the role he was always supposed to play. In Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean captures the simmering intellect and the proud weirdness of the poet warrior at the center of the story through outlandish visuals. Patton provides a daring look at the other grand creature of the desert, and it is the film's overall matter-of-factness (while still allowing Patton's lunatic humor to shine through) that shows us how and why this larger than life human being came about.

The second half of the film is undoubtedly better than the first. Moving to familiar territory -- I hate to be Euro-centric, but most of what I care about in WWII was the post-D-Day campaigns in Italy, France, and Germany -- the film picks up the pace and gives us a look at a man desperately trying to regain (or maybe gain for the first time) a sense of glory and power that his higher-ups took away from him. From his funny and warm speech at the Doughnut Club to powerful and evocative moments on the snow-filled battlefields of Bastogne, we get a glimpse of the kind of man Patton was when he was trying to prove something -- as opposed to the first half, when we get the man who thinks he's already proved everything. It's a more humanizing act in the story, and the beautiful cinematography and elegant pacing serve to highlight the robustness of Patton's one-of-a-kind personality within the context of the larger European war.

It's somewhat odd that the Academy picked this film, which is really not an anti-war film by any stretch of the imagination, for Best Picture during the waning days of the Vietnam War. Every other war film to win the award -- All Quiet on the Western Front, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Deer Hunter, and Platoon -- is loaded to the brim with cynicism about the art and execution of battle, and yet this war-glorifying film came in the midst of the most hated military operation in our nation's history. It's just curious.

I always prefer films about soldiers to films about commanding officers. It's simply more interesting to watch the day to day struggles of "regular guys" than it is to watch grown men sit around a table and count the nameless, faceless casualties. But Patton is a powerful film that has always stuck with me and probably always will, regardless of the distance it keeps from the real horrors of the battlefield. I give it a 9/10.