Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!
One of several calendar years where I have serious holes in my game is the year 1970. Of the five nominees I'd only ever seen Five Easy Pieces, and that was decades ago (I'll need to give that a rewatch at some point). So I decided to start at the top of the list and watch the Best Picture winner, Patton, starring George C. Scott as the titular controversial World War II General.
Patton is both a character study and a war film (some might even call it anti-war), which focuses specifically on George S. Patton's exploits and views the war mostly through his eyes. We begin with the famous speech to his men, in the iconic opening scene depicting the General standing in front of a giant US flag that fills the entire frame, Patton himself lined up perfectly with the bottom edge, as though he's on a stage speaking directly to the audience. This speech conveys a ton of information about the man, just through his attitude toward war. "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country," he tells his troops, "He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country." To call George Patton a war hawk would be an understatement. War was his entire raison d'être. "I love it more than my own life," he tells a colleague. His passion for battle was so well-known even the German Captain Steiger, who had studied Patton's career, pitied his imminent obsolescence as the Allies took Berlin.
Patton was a brilliant strategist and an aggressive fighter. He was also, as this film makes clear, a brutal, callous taskmaster without regard for the psychological well-being of his men. In the film's second act he berates and slaps a soldier suffering from PTSD in front of an entire hospital ward and demands the crying man be sent back to the front lines. The incident got Patton reassigned to a decoy post for part of the European invasion, the harshest punishment the General could've imagined. This film is a warts-and-all portrayal of a larger-than-life figure who served his country well on the battlefield but was far from admirable off it. We learn that his disdain for the Russians outweighed his dislike of the Nazis, going so far to imply after the war the Allies were fighting the wrong enemy. The film somewhat glosses over his appalling anti-Semitism, but otherwise the script makes it clear we aren't meant to feel much sympathy for the man.
George C. Scott won a very well-deserved Oscar for his portrayal, which is truly a tour-de-force. Scott embodies Patton so thoroughly and with such relentless velocity I can't picture any other actor in this role. He was not the director's first choice; Rod Steiger, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne all turned down the part. And it served the film well that they did; aside from Steiger I can't see any of those actors really disappearing into this character. Scott perfectly captures Patton's austerity and hubris, while also injecting a touch of pathos so that when Patton's being sidelined we actually do pity him a bit.
The battle scenes are spectacular in such a way that we're detached from the human element. We see tanks obliterating each other and soil catapulted into the air from the sheer force of the mortars, but we see very little of the effect on the soldiers themselves. Much like Patton we're often exhilarated by the action, and it's only in an occasional aftermath that the toll on human life is observed. Late in the film Patton visits a battlefield littered with corpses and is affected not by the loss of life but by the bravery of his men, who after running out of fuel and artillery resorted to hand-fighting.
Visually Patton is an unusual blend of 1970s realism and 1960s road show epic. The dialogue scenes are mostly shot and lit in the traditional manner, with static coverage and bright stage lighting. But every so often cinematographer Fred J. Koenekamp throws in a Kubrick-esque wide-angle shot or a handheld, making the film feel more cutting edge for the time.
Patton is close to three hours and it earns its expansive running time. Scott's performance carries the film but so does the inside look at the politics of war. At numerous points Patton is at odds with star British General Montgomery, each jockeying to position his respective campaign as the standout so he can bask in the glory. In that way Patton leans into anti-war sentiment, exposing the ugliness of using infantry as mere pawns even in a justified war. It very much feels like a transitional piece, bridging the gap between 1960s conventional epic cinema and the more cynical, ugly realism of the early 70s. It depicts war mostly as an exciting spectacle but also touches on the trauma and destruction that goes with it. That such a traditionally structured Hollywood epic regarded World War II not simply as a series of gallant exploits but as various shades of gray is significant. George S. Patton was a lot of things, but rarely does this film depict him as heroic.
I give Patton **** out of ****.
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