Fascinating portrait

Rating: 8/10 (11 June 2000)

This is a good movie, dominated by Scott's portrayal of the "magnificent anachronism" Patton. By the way, Rommel himself described Patton as that.
This film can hardly be described as historically balanced, containing amongst other things, liberal doses of Brit bashing, a fine tradition continued by the more recent Saving Private Ryan and U-571 in which Holloywood rewrites history to satisfy latent Yank ego in a way more normally associated with Mao's China. No, this is a subjective snapshot of a great man, with his strengths confirmed and his weaknesses excused. It's interesting that the main advisor to this movie was Omar Bradley, one of Patton's friends in the film.
History aside, I like this movie a lot. The cast range from sublime (Scott) to excellent (Malden) to just good. But the strongest point of this movie is the script (co-written by Francis Ford Coppolla) which is rich in symbolism, giving the director a strong foundation to build on.
Some of the scenes in this movie are continually with me: his meeting with his protege in the graveyard before a battle; his reading the weather prayer written by his chaplain; the end sequence where he walks past the windmill like a latter day Quixote, and of course, the rousing speech at the beginning. For a film like this there is a surprising amount of humour, which Scott makes the most of in his performance to turn Patton into a very sympathetic figure.
I think the nearest film I've seen like this is 'Lawrence of Arabia', which is definitely a better movie in almost every way except maybe the cast- although that's more of a compliment to 'Arabia' than an insult to Patton. It would be interesting to make a comparison between the two as they both contain central characters who almost seemed called to do what they did.