Retrospective: Patton (Patreon)

"It was here. The battlefield was here. The Carthaginians defending the city were attacked by three Roman legions. The Carthaginians were proud and brave, but they couldn't hold. They were massacred. Arab women... stripped them of their tunics and their swords and lances. The soldiers lay naked in the sun. 2,000 years ago... I was here."

General Patton stands in the ruins of Carthage. He bows to the ephemeral, haunted and awed by it. He doesn't live in the world of Yamamoto, Eisenhower, and Goebbels. He lives and breathes history, gazing across a field and seeing the spirits of Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Clausewitz. As one Nazi observes, "The absence of war will kill him. The pure warrior. A magnificent anachronism."

In 1970, Patton's war was a recent memory; the war remembered as America's great triumph against Fascism. But in the midst of the Cold War and the advent of the credibility gap, the good old Just War must have felt like a dream. Franklin J. Schaffner and Francis Ford Coppola's Patton shows an even more uncomfortable truth: the Just War was led by the same kind of madness that took Americans to Vietnam.

Patton is fighting a different war than Ike Eisenhower and Omar Bradley. George C. Scott plays the general with crackling madness, masking a sentimental, wounded interior (basically, a lot less crazy than the real Patton). "You're gambling with these boys' lives," Bradley says. "What happens to them, the ordinary combat soldier? He doesn't share in your dreams of glory. He's stuck here."

Does Patton's madness work? Perhaps. Why did that madness work in 1945 but cause such destruction in 1970? To the movie's credit, Patton doesn't answer that. At nearly three hours, does Patton take too much time exploring that question? Perhaps. Are there too many scenes of Patton musing about his place in history while his peers berate him for his dreams of glory? Absolutely, but this is a damn sight better than almost every American war movie following it.