Last night (March 25) Turner Classic Movies did a salute to Academy Award-winning or -nominated biopics as part of their “31 Days of Oscar” celebration, and I watched two of them: Patton (1970) and The Last Emperor (1987). Patton was one of 20th Century-Fox’s cycle of mega-films about World War II, starting with The Longest Day (1962), about the D-Day invasion of France on June 6, 1944, and continuing through to this one and Tora! Tora! Tora! (also 1970), about the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. This time 20th Century-Fox studio head Richard Zanuck (son of Darryl F. Zanuck,who had led Fox for years since the merger that created the awkwardly titled studio in 1936), producer Frank McCarthy and director Franklin J. Schaffner (which sounds more like the name of a banker than a filmmaker) decided to focus on the European theatre and in particular the larger-than-life character of General George S. Patton, Jr., played in a remarkable tour de force performance by George C. Scott. The script was by two highly talented writers, Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North (the latter an odd name to see on a war film since his best-known credit is the openly pacifist 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still, though his résumé lists other 1960’s pro-war films like Sink the Bismarck!, Damn the Defiant! and Submarine X-1), and I remember being a bit perplexed at the time that Coppola wasn’t hired to direct it as well. Schaffner delivers a competent, workmanlike job that basically consists of pointing the cameras at George C. Scott and getting (and staying) out of his way.
One aspect of Patton that bothered me when it was new – I saw it on its initial theatrical release but hadn’t seen it since until last night – was Jerry Goldsmith’s musical score, full of trumpet voluntaries run through echo machines, though I found it interesting this time that Schaffner left most of the actual battle scenes unscored. To me that made them more powerful than they would have been if there’d been a thundering Max Steiner-esque score under them. Patton was made at an ideologically fraught time, in which the Viet Nam war was still going on and some critics made invidious comparisons between Patton’s fabled aggressiveness and what seemed like the relative timidity of the U.S. commanders in Viet Nam. It was definitely a film for “hawks,” though my mother told me that as much as she reviled war in general and the Viet Nam war in particular, if the Earth were ever invaded by aliens from outer space she would want there to be a man like Pqatton to lead Earth’s resistance. Patton begins with George C. Scott standing in front of a huge American flag delivering a speech actually spoken by the real General Patton – the one ion which he said, “No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for their country. You win a war by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” Origiinally this scene had been planned to come just after the intermission, but producer McCarthy and director Schaffner decided to use ot to open the film – much to the discontent of George C. Scott, who thought that if the film began with such a powerful and iconic moment the rest of his performance would suffer by comparison. (He needn’t have worried.)
What’s most striking about Patton today is the portrayal of the ego contests between the Allied generals, particularly the British commander Sir Bernard Lee Montgomery (Michael Bates). Through much of the film, Patton seems more concerned with beating Montgomery to key strategic locations than he is with fighting the Germans. Patton himself comes through as a super-dedicated military man, a student of military history – in one of the film’s most famous scenes he insists on driving out to a battlefield in Morocco, much to the consternation of his drive (Bill Hickman)r, who knows full well that the real battle Patton just fought was nowhere near there. Patton explains that he wants to visit the site of one of the key battles in Rome’s defeat of Carthage during the Third Punic War. Throughout the movie Patton speaks of classic historical battles and says, “I was there” – though it’s unclear whether he literally believes in reincarnation or just that he’s read so much about these battles it feels like he was there. Patton’s live of military history is a Leitmotif throughout the film – at one point during the planning for D-Day he urges his fellow Allied commanders to use the plan General Heinirich von Schlieffen devised to conquer France during World War I – as is his recitation of Romantic-sounding poetry it turns out he’s written himself.
The fabled incident in which Patton slaps an American soldier (Tim Considine) because he’s told the medical department he just can’t take the strain of combat anymore is in the movie, though one piece of Pattoniana – his mounting an elaborate and time-consuming (and ultimately failed) attack on a German P.O.W. camp to free his son-in-law – isn’t in the film and I only found out about ot a couple of years ago from a YouTube video. One of the best parts of the Coppola-North script is the periodic inserts of scenes set in the German high command camp, in which Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Karl Michael Vogler) and his staff – including First Lieutenant Alexander Stiller (Patrick J. Zunca), whom Rommel assigns to study Patton and who essentially becomes Rommel’s “Patton whisperer” discuss the Allied commanders, especially the scene in which the Germans literally can’t believe the Allies would have sidelined their best general just for slapping an enlisted man.
Patton is depicted as a premature Cold Warrior, anxious to attack the Russians “now, while we have the Army here” rather than wait for the war against Germany and Japan to end. In a chillingly prophetic scene he talks about how he’s shocked by the German “wonder weapons,” including drones, and says they would take all the glory, honor and nobility out of war. Through much of the movie I kept flashing back to Scott’s performance as the maniac general Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove six years earlier – at times Patton seems like a prequel to Strangelove – and Patton’s still mysterious death in an auto accident in postwar Germany on December 9, 1945 (Patton was severely injured and died 12 days later) seems like an odd sort of blessing since he could no longer do the one thing on earth he could do well, which was fight and lead men into combat. George C. Scott played Patton again ini a 1987 TV-movie about his death called The Last Days of Patton.
