Last Hurrah for the Fighting Male of the West

Rating: 10/10 (12 November 2014)

Just saw 'Patton' with George C. Scott for Veteran's Day and thought I would comment on it while it's still a fire in my mind.
Francis Ford Coppola wrote a very enlightened screenplay that thoughtfully explores the Western Male Ethos and its accruing limitations as it plays its 'civilizing influence' out across the millennia. But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing, not one little thing without the towering Shakespearean quality performance of George C. Scott. When actors speak about shadings, depths and levels, undertones and overtones in a performance this is what they are talking about.
This thing of beauty that Scott creates in the persona of General Patton will explain to you on a visceral level why we still have wars and why Cronus ate his children. Why Knute Rockne felt it necessary to explain the need of any society to sublimate somehow the natural male spirit and propensity for combat and, (dare I say it?) conquest in their relationships and surroundings. When wide-eyed innocents ask you "-why is there War?", don't explain anything to them. Just sit them down to watch this film and they will also understand why there is football and the deification of Bruce Lee.
It is because of this guy; the 'pure warrior' strutting about over a vast playing field creating big Hollywood effects in blood and explosions and steeling himself against the human carnage he has wrought without hardly breaking stride.
It is for the glamor and the glory and the thrill and the love of POWER, baby. THAT is why males engage in such a 'preposterous way to settle a dispute' as Sherlock Holmes would comment registering his disgust while twiddling his thumbs and awaiting a 'case' that will once again have him engaged in the hunt and the chase and the fight.
Scott conveys through his performance a mythic archetype who somehow takes you grudgingly into his confidence and despite all his carefully orchestrated bombast gets you to know him in subtle and intimate ways. He knows, like Alan Ladd's 'Shane', that his days are numbered. There have been way too many women and children marched naked in the parade before the conqueror's stand for him to be put up with much longer and the clamor for him to march his own way back into the dim mists of history is rising to a deafening pitch. But before he goes, he just wants to hitch up his ivory plated pistols one last time, partners, and show you turkeys how a real warmonger gets it done. That is because he honors and reveres and loves all this with a fervor approaching religious ecstasy and in a way you never will. As James Brown would exclaim, "Everybody relax; and watch me work!" The wonder is how Scott manages to simultaneously convey General George Patton as a larger than life figure and yet as someone as real and down to Earth as that son of a bitch who keeps complaining about how your kids are always running across his lawn and what he'll do to them the next time. Seeing him in scenes with the other actors he stands out not because of the usual physical beauty of the standard leading man, but because he seems so out of place. He is indeed a walking human anachronism. This is World War II and the American Armed Forces have enough intelligence, grit, technology and will to win it. But just in case events don't go their way, they have brought Solomon Grundy back from the grave to reserve as their Ace in the hole.
Karl Malden and supporting cast come across as temperate paragons of sanity next to Scott's fiery Patton. Even the Nazi officers seem like civil servants simply doing their job, as was their assertion when defending the Jewish holocaust. This film, to Scott's credit, seems all about Patton and the holy and unholy forces he has unleashed to make everybody head for the hills before all the evidence is burned and he is finally reigned in for good. Everybody else is fighting for Home and Country, but Scott's Patton is the Spirit of War plying them to accept his Faustian bargain. Thank God nobody takes him up on it.
There are many other things to be said about this film. It is like encountering a beautiful woman in the Library. Later on, you try to convince yourself she wasn't all that, but upon encountering her again you realize she WAS all that and there were even more features to her beauty that only now you can appreciate.
This is not 'The Best Years of Our Lives'. But should you like films that make you feel like you're part of a winning gang earning the approval of an ornery father by doing the impossible and whose portrait oddly resembles that of the dearly departed Dorian Gray, I can only recommend this poetry spouting reincarnation of the Force of War.
However, when taking your girl on a date, and having a choice between seeing 'Love Story' or 'Patton', I suggest you see 'Love Story' first.