Gets Better With Age

Rating: 9/10 (6 December 2012)

A few random thoughts: 1. The great broadcaster Walter Cronkite, who covered Patton during the war, felt this film captured the man extremely well. 2. My favorite brief scene in the movie is where Patton looks out over the ancient battlefield (Rome vs. Carthage), the music flares gently, he describes the battle in a few succinct sentences, pauses, and says, "I was here." 2a. My favorite extended sequence in the movie (in fact, in any movie) is Patton's pivot north to relieve Bastogne, from the first stirrings of enemy activity in the Ardennes Forest to the chaplain's successful prayer for good weather. 3. Omar Bradley (Karl Malden) comes off very well in the movie. This may be historically inaccurate. The excellent military historian Victor Davis Hanson, in his 1999 book "The Soul of Battle," rips Bradley for his bureaucratic timidity (he does the same for Ike) and praises Patton to the skies. Davis' writing on Patton is splendid. 4. I like how the movie leaves implicit, rather than making explicit, a central fact: Patton's pursuit of military glory was entirely congruent with America's best interests in the war (and I'm sure he knew this). There was no conflict whatsoever between him needing to be great and America's need to win; in fact, his ambition fueled our victory. 5. President Nixon reportedly watched this film a number of times before the invasion of Cambodia. When I was a kid I scoffed at this. Oddly enough, the older I get, the more I understand it. Not the invasion. The watching of the movie to brace oneself for a massive task. 6. If you read the Aubrey-Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian, about the Royal Navy circa 1800, you get a good feeling for the deep depression that can come upon a combat soldier after seeing action. This, of course, is the body readjusting - it's the body coming down from a huge adrenalin high and finding homeostatis again. I'm convinced this is what happened to Patton after he completed his magnificent crossing of Europe. This, in combination with head injuries suffered during horseback riding, significantly unbalanced him, IMO. We see the lack of balance in the film in his phone conversation with Gen. Smith about the Russians: "You give me ten days and I'll have us at war with them, and I'll make it look like it's their fault!" 7. In the early 1970s, when the film came out, with the Soviets and the U.S. pointing nukes at one another and the world worried about nuclear incineration, a whole lot of people watched that phone scene and thought, "Hey, not a bad idea - that might have worked out OK." Yeah, maybe, except for the fact that the Red Army had many millions of men in Eastern Europe, plus tanks, planes, and artillery; the U.S. didn't have nukes yet; and Americans were sick-and-tired of war. 8. The script is amazingly good. It takes a sprawling topic and makes it manageable and fascinating. A well-deserved Oscar for Francis Ford Coppola. 9. With reference to Patton's scabrous view of the Russians, do a Google search for "They Raped Every German Female From 8 to 80" for background. 10. Some people hate this movie. If you go to Roger Ebert's website, rogerebert.com, you'll find comments from one or two of these folks. I truly do not see their point of view on this one, at all, and I'm tempted to think that a person who hates this movie perhaps hates movies in general, or maybe hates America in all its complexities and fissures and wildness.