There is no way to write about Patton without starting where the film starts, in front of the flag. A vast American flag fills the screen, a small man in cavalry boots and polished helmet walks out in front of it, and for the next several minutes he addresses an army we never see, in language that is by turns obscene, funny, and frankly appalling. It is one of the great openings in American cinema, and it is also a trap. Franklin J. Schaffner’s film spends the following two and a half hours trying to be more skeptical about this man than that opening allows it to be, and it does not entirely succeed. That tension is the most interesting thing about the picture, and the reason it is still worth arguing over.
The Two Films Inside It
The screenplay is credited to Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North, and you can feel two sensibilities pulling against each other in nearly every scene. One of them is writing a study of a man who is temperamentally a relic, a believer in reincarnation and personal destiny who has been born into an era of logistics, committees, and press conferences, and who is destroyed less by the enemy than by the fact that modern war is a bureaucratic enterprise and he is a poet of slaughter. The other is writing a monument.
Schaffner’s direction, shot in vast 70mm by Fred Koenekamp, keeps siding with the monument. The film’s compositions are built to make Patton look inevitable: he is repeatedly placed against enormous ancient landscapes, ruins, and columns of men stretching to the horizon, so that even the sequences meant to expose his vanity end up visually confirming it. Jerry Goldsmith’s score does the same trick more cleverly, and is arguably the smartest interpretive act in the film. Its famous triple-echoed trumpet figure is not martial, it is spectral, a bugle call arriving from centuries away, and it undercuts the marching theme every time it appears. Goldsmith heard the irony that the camera keeps declining to shoot.
Scott, and the Problem of a Great Performance
George C. Scott’s performance is not merely the film’s engine, it is the film’s argument, and it is one of the few screen performances that genuinely deserves the word monumental. What makes it extraordinary is the voice: Scott plays a man with a high, thin, slightly ridiculous instrument who has spent his life training himself to be terrifying with it. You can hear the effort. You can hear him choosing the profanity, deploying the scripture, timing the pause. It is a performance about performance, about a man who has invented a character called Patton and can no longer step out of it, and Scott lets the seams show at exactly the right moments.
The famous business of Scott declining the Academy Award he won for it has become part of the film’s mythology, and the film’s admirers tend to treat it as further evidence of some shared integrity between actor and subject. That is nonsense, and it is the kind of nonsense a great performance attracts. What actually happened on screen is more interesting than any offscreen gesture: Scott built a character whose self-mythologizing the film cannot fully control, and audiences went home loving the man they were supposed to be uneasy about.
Karl Malden’s Omar Bradley is the necessary counterweight and the film’s second-best performance, though it is a thankless one. Bradley is written as the decent professional, the man who wins by competence and consideration rather than by theater, and Malden plays him with a watchful, faintly wounded patience. The trouble is that the film uses him as a moral thermostat rather than a character. Whenever Patton goes too far, we cut to Bradley looking troubled, and the film considers the ethical question addressed. It is not addressed. It is outsourced to a reaction shot.
The War Itself
As a combat film, Patton is oddly weightless, and this is our central reservation. The battle sequences are enormous, expensively staged, and almost entirely uninvolving, because Schaffner shoots them as a spectator rather than a participant. Tanks advance across wide plains in long lenses. Explosions bloom at a comfortable distance. There is very little sense of what any of these engagements cost, what the terrain meant, or what a soldier inside one of those vehicles experienced. The film’s most celebrated set piece, a duel in North Africa, is exciting largely because we are told beforehand that Patton has anticipated it, so we watch a plan being confirmed rather than a battle being fought.
The consequence is that the film’s own critique loses its teeth. If we are meant to be troubled by a man who loves war, the film has an obligation to show us what he loves, honestly, including the part that gets people killed. Instead the deaths in Patton are almost all rhetorical: they occur in briefings, in casualty figures, in the notorious hospital sequence where the general strikes a soldier suffering from what we would now recognize as combat trauma. That scene is the film’s strongest indictment, and it works precisely because it is intimate and close and unbearable. Nothing else in the picture is shot with that nerve.
There are other gaps. The film’s Germans exist mainly as an admiring chorus, a set of intelligence officers who study Patton from afar and supply the audience with flattering assessments of his genius. It is a convenient device that lets the movie praise its subject in a voice other than its own. And the film has almost nothing to say about what the Allies were actually fighting, which for a war picture of this scale and ambition is a striking omission. The middle stretch, covering Patton’s exile from command, also sags: the film is structurally dependent on his voice, and when he is denied a stage the picture has to mark time until he gets one back.
Why It Endures
So why is it still, by common consent, one of the major American films of its era, and why did it sweep the Academy Awards in a year when the country’s feelings about its own army were anything but settled?
Partly because it arrived at exactly the right moment to be read two ways. Audiences who wanted a hero found one. Audiences who wanted a portrait of American militarism as vanity and appetite found that too, and could point to the same scenes. A film that can be watched sincerely from opposite directions has a long life, whether or not that ambiguity was fully intentional.
But mostly it endures because of what it gets right about a very specific kind of failure. The film’s real subject is obsolescence: a man superbly equipped for a war that no longer exists, whose gifts are inseparable from the qualities that make him unfit for the peace, and who understands this about himself well enough to be frightened by it. That idea is present in Scott’s face throughout, particularly in the closing passage, which is quiet, plain, and unexpectedly moving after all the brass. The film does not need to editorialize there. It simply lets a man walk away from the only life that ever made sense to him, with a line about glory being fleeting that has been waiting since the opening minute.
Patton is grand, intelligent, self-contradicting, and roughly forty minutes longer than its ideas require. It contains one of the finest performances ever given on film inside a movie that never fully decides what it thinks of the man being performed. Watch it for Scott, watch it for Goldsmith, and watch it with the flag speech in mind, because everything the film later says about him is offered as a correction to something it sold you first.
