Patton

I didn't intend to do a couple of World War II pictures so close to each other after putting up a post on Bitter Victory. But I noticed that Patton is in the FXM rotation. It's got an airing tomorrow at 12:10 PM, followed by another one at 3:00 AM Monday (Nov. 9), and a couple the following week.

George C. Scott plays General George S. Patton, who stands in front of a giant American flag and gives some new recruits a lecture about how war isn't about dying for your country, but making the other bastard die for his country. Cut to North Africa in 1943, where the US has just been routed by Rommel's forces in the battle at the Kasserine Pass.

Back at headquarters in Morocco, Patton is named the commander of the II Corps, which has the job of slogging through North Africa in preparation for the invasion of Sicily. Patton finds laxity at headquarters, and immediately becomes the sort of martinet Henry Fonda was in Fort Apache, commiserating with his friend and fellow general Omar Bradley (Karl Malden). Bradley points out that Patton has some enemies in high places, in no small part because of his personality.

Eventually the Allies do invade Sicily, and Patton doesn't like the plans mostly because he thinks is has the Allies going too slowly and won't let him get enough of the glory in the operation. (Can't he see this is part of why higher-ups like Eisenhower might be blocking the advancement of his career?) So what does Patton do? He sets things up so that he winds up in Messina, just across the strait from mainland Italy, before the Brits. Nobody could deny that Patton had one success after another where other commanders failed, but at the same time he was basically defying orders and a bit of a nasty egotist and frightful in his command.

Well, a lot of nasty and frightening. This we see in a scene where Patton is famously visiting a military field hospital and finds that a couple of the soldiers there are in for combat fatigue. Patton knows only the glory of physical struggle, and cannot comprehend that some men are just wired differently and aren't cut out to be on the front lines. He thinks basic training can just beat his values into them, and considers anybody with combat fatigue a coward. So he smacks one of the soldiers suffering from combat fatigue!

This is a big no-no, so Patton is relieved of command and sent to England in part to do public relations with the British who have to put up with the Americans stationed there, and in part to serve as a decoy to the Nazis. The Nazis are well aware of Patton's success and nervous with the idea of him being more in command than Bradley or British Field Marshal Montgomery (Michael Bates). So they're keeping track of him and his personality to figure out what he's going to do next.

Eventually, the Army needs more generals in the invasion of Europe, so Patton is put back into regular service commanding the Third Army, making rapid advances through France and saving the surrounded division at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (you may remember them from Battleground). As we all know from history, the Allies won World War II and Patton would go on to die in a car accident at the end of 1945, although Patton's death is not shown in the movie.

Watching it, I couldn't help but think of Scott's portrayal of Patton as being a lot like Brian Keith's performance as Theodore Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion, that latter movie coming to mind recently thanks to the passing of Sean Connery. Both Patton and Roosevelt are portrayed as driven men who know exactly what they want and how to get it, and that the only way to get it is by living the strenuous life. Both are also portrayed as contemptuous of anybody who won't live the strenuous life.

Patton, unsurprisingly, is almost entirely about Patton, with everybody else being a fairly minor character, the biggest among them being the aforementioned Omar Bradley. George C. Scott is suitably larger than life, giving a bravura performance as an extremely complicated man, in the wrong time but not in the wrong place. It's easy to see why all the other generals would hate him (and much of getting that high up in the military is political), but also tough to deny that he had a knack for accomplishing things in wartime.

Patton does seem to be in print on DVD. One thing I noticed is that the DVD release I checked lists a running time of 171 minutes, while IMDb says 172; those could just be rounding differences. FXM has it in a 170-minute time slot, and on the DVR recording I watched I didn't see the Fox fanfare, the movie cold opening with the speech in front of a flag which comes before the opening credits. The print ran 168 minutes; I'm not certain what if anything was cut out.