This Movie is Omar Bradley's Take on Patton

Rating: 8/10 (28 October 2011)

Although two other soldiers are credited with consulting on "Patton," Gen. Omar Bradley gets consulting credit in huge letters, and the sources for Francis Ford Coppola's script are given as Ladislas Farago's biography of Patton plus Bradley's own memoir, "A Soldier's Story." This is significant because much of this movie is told from the viewpoint of Bradley including the way Patton is ultimately portrayed. George C. Scott ultimately "defends" Patton. (I once heard an actor say that "defending" is often an actor's job when playing a villain but that it can be the job of playing a flawed hero, too.) Nevertheless, having just watched the first half of this movie (having seen the whole thing years ago and mindful of not remembering the rest of the movie as vividly as the part that I saw last night), I can't help seeing this great movie in a bit more critical light than I did when I did not know more about the real life people in question.
A good example of how the movie takes Bradley's side against Patton (but how Scott defends him) is in the scene in which Bradley complains to his superior about the losses in Sicily and Patton says, it's time to remember how many more losses there would have been if men were still slogging up that road they had been supposed to follow. Of course, this raises the problem of how do you know what would have happened if you had taken a different path from the one you took, but Patton could have been right; there was, after all, no bloodless way to take Sicily away from the Germans.
In a prior scene, where Bradley is advocating caution and taking time, he says to Patton, "The difference between you and me is, I do this job because I was trained for it, you do it because you love it." There is a certain amount of self-justification in all of that. After all, later on it wasn't just Field Marshal B. L. Montgomery who screwed Patton in Europe, it was Bradley whose over-caution led him to reject Patton's plan for a swift entrapment of the German army followed by a swift invasion of Germany. Patton was a bastard, there is no doubt, but his plans were daring enough to shorten the war by a year. Bradley's caution, in the end, cost lives, as Puck-20 already implied in his review. Loving your subordinates is warm and fuzzy, but give me a Patton who gets the boys home by Christmas by winning the war.