Theatres of War

Rating: Null/10 (15 September 2010)

"The myths of World War II have warped our view of how we look at things today. The twisted memory of it encourages the men of my generation to be willing, almost eager, to use military force anywhere in the world." – Admiral Gene LaRoque
"Magnificent! Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavour shrink to insignificance. God help me, I do love it so!" - General George Patton
Underrated director Franklin J. Schaffner turns in more good work with "Patton". It's a grand biography of US Army General George Patton, filled with Schaffner's customarily excellent photography, though philosophically things are a bit dubious. Blame screenwriter Francis Ford Coppoa for this.
As is now well known, "Patton" follows General Patton from the moment he takes charge of the demoralised American II Corps in North Africa, to his march into Germany itself. The film massively overstates Patton's influence on the war, ignores the real causes of the war and the Imperialistic equivalencies between all parties involved, but that's to be expected of a film which panders to American egos.
Interestingly, "Patton" is explicitly about performance. The movie opens with Patton on stage, features a Patton who believes himself to be "performing" the reincarnated "role" of past warriors, features military tactics which rely on decoys and deception (ie more performance acting), treats Patton's life as a predestined concert show and the world as a grand stage, sports a soundtrack that is literally composed of resurrected echoes of the past, shows generals as being preoccupied with public perception and nurturing their media personalities, portrays war as being one big performance in which victory is simply a means of becoming a top celebrity, and is filled with characters who are obsessed with "the proper conduct" and the "right way to perform" or "carry oneself". Add to this the fact that the historical Patton was himself an erudite and intelligent man who only adopted a false persona of machismo and bluster and you have a film which is entirely about both performance and the egos which fuel wars (see Kaufman's "The Right Stuff").
This, incidentally, is why actor George C Scott, who plays General George Patton in the film, was interested in the project, though he'd ultimately be unhappy with the film's final product. He'd go so far as to turn down the Oscar he won for his role, disgusted by the film's popularity.
Odd for a war movie, "Patton" is interested in the logistics of war, the scale of the war effort, the size of the US military machine and of course the expansiveness of Europe itself. Watch how Schaffner stresses the lengths of supply lines, the distances covered by tanks and convoys, the vast number of different generals operating in tandem etc. You really get the sense of a huge and multifaceted war machine rumbling across Europe. No other film does this better.
Also interesting is this: the film was cynically designed (and Coppola admits this himself) to appeal to both right and left wingers, to war hawks and pacifists. The entire film is thus constructed in such a way as to allow audience members to praise or rebuke General Patton, depending on their own political dispositions. Or at least that's what was intended. In actuality, Scott seduces you with his hard-on for war and conquest. So though the script sets up an ending in which we're given the false choice of viewing Patton as either a necessary relic or an unnecessary relic who "walks off into the horizon of history", the reality is that Patton will never go away. He'll aways be resurrected, whole nations always on the brink of saddling up to the next Patton, hungry to suckle on his testosterone soaked teats. Indeed, the majority of Coppola's films evoke the seductive lure of megalomania, a trait he shares with Oliver Stone, both directors often undermining what they believe the messages of their films to be.
Incidentally, "Patton" was part of a group of war films released between 1965 and 1977 ("Bridge Too Far", "Tora! Tora! Tora!", "The Longest Day", "Midway", "Battle of Britain", "Battle of the Bulge", "Patton", "633 Squadron" etc), all of which tried to broaden the scope of previous war films by focusing on as wide a cross section of military personnel as possible.
Unlike the platoon genre, these "hierarchal films" aimed to portray war on a far larger canvas. They promised to offer audiences the "spectacle of history", viewers being granted a nuts and bolts recreation of some historical event in which the entire hierarchy of the military machine took part. Significantly, the event being recreated often revolved around some grand disaster (Pearl Harbour, the Blitz, D Day etc). These are all films in which noble Allies bravely fight against all odds (against an overwhelming, savage, superior foe), only to eventually emerge with a kind of bittersweet victory. These films thus display contempt and reverence in equal measure. This is a contradiction which infects most war films. On the one hand, these treatments predict a pessimistic, even tragic outcome and outlook, whilst on the other they want to curry the favour of audiences, a procedure that predicts an optimistic, even a celebratory outcome/outlook. Celebratory vs Tragedy: it is in this fashion that most war films veer pathologically between antiwar statement and gung-ho propaganda. Covertly such art succumbs to the Cult of the Military. The Cult which says that Freedom isn't free, and that the cost of freedom is blood which must periodically be sacrificed on the altar of Liberty by the military clergy.
Perhaps the last film in this cycle was "A Bridge Too Far" (1977), by which time audiences were tired of WW2. At this point a series of cathartic Vietnam films were realised, which had about as little to do with Vietnam as the WW2 films before them had to do with WW2.
7.9/10 - Worth one viewing.