The Patton LaserDisc is one of the better looking discs that Fox put out. Clean, crisp and sharp. The sound is good, but don't expect miracles from the standard sound effects and the music tracks.

Patton is a strange one for me. I have a hard time with war movies, primarily because I have a difficult time remembering abstract things, such as where a bridge is in relation to our forces and so on. It's so bad with me that it almost rivals what I call my "Shakespearean Dyslexia"; perhaps it's a matter of my not wanting to understand the dynamics of war.

When Patton was released in 1970, I was 12. Just a shade too early for me to be interested in the film. Of course, the 1960s were rife with big films about World War I, World War II, and just about any other war that could be made into a movie. War was a hot topic. I got dragged to some of them. They were considered suitable for family viewing. At the time, the audience for war films was considerable. The men who fought in World War II rightly regarded it as the defining era of their lives; they were endlessly fascinated by all the revelations, stories, documentaries, novels and films about the conflict.

Storytellers had all sorts of approaches for tapping this audience. There was the telling of a particular battle: Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), The Longest Day (1962) and The Battle of the Bulge (1965). There were the stories of the sabotage groups sent in to destroy some target (which could be actual or fictional), such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) or The Guns of Navarone (1961). Then there was the WWII film that did not depict any battles per se, but other aspects of the situation, such as the great POW films Stalag 17 (1953) and The Great Escape (1963).

© 1970, 20th-Century Fox Film Corporation, All Rights Reserved.

So, World War II became a genre of films. There was a steady audience for the product, there were many stories to be told about the war. There certainly was a breed of picture maker who was delighted to be struggling with the heavy logistics and rugged hard living making these films demanded. As the western faded in the 60s, the War Picture became the film genre of choice for some of our hardiest film workers. But like the western, the audiences who were gobbling up everything from The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960) to Kelly's Heroes (1970), were changing. With the passage of time, and the digesting of the historical records, filmmakers were tempted to tell the stories of the war with new interpretations, rather than the way it had been thought of before.

Patton surely must be the first WWII film to be made, like Lawrence of Arabia (1962), about a specific historical figure (that is, if you discount stuff like Audie Murphy's To Hell and Back from 1955), and seemingly for the same reason: somebody thought that it would make a great movie. The person who thought so was Frank McCarthy. A Virginian, McCarthy had been in the Signal Corps during the war, and afterwards, he was an important liaison between Hollywood producers and the military. He knew how the whole process worked. Almost in the same way as Richard Attenborough seems to have trained his whole life in order to make Gandhi (1982), McCarthy seems to have been born to make this film.

He certainly tried hard enough. Although the subject of the film, General George S. Patton, died in 1945, McCarthy contacted his widow, Beatrice, about obtaining the rights to the Patton story. She did not feel that it was such a good idea. Her thinking was that the press and the media had brought so much misery to her husband over the course of his career, that a film biography would only serve to continue to warp the public's view of her husband.

Even though she died in 1953, she was not far from wrong on this. Patton was released at the height of the Vietman War and the accompanying anti-war protests. The controversy regarding George S. Patton and what he possibly symbolizes, was full-blown from the moment the film hit the screen.

And it is an amazing film. No one denies that. It is one of the uncanny feats of this film is that no matter what your views on America and war are, one comes away from this film really feeling that you have walked several long miles in Patton's shoes. Of course, the fact that Patton was a fascinating character is doubtless one of the reasons he became a General in the first place.

© 1970, 20th-Century Fox Film Corporation, All Rights Reserved.

I like Patton. It's a war film without too much war. The filmmakers don't ask me to get involved with the details (except perhaps during the rescue of the squadron trapped in Bastogne). There is a scene where Patton is standing in front of a huge map. It is totally unrecognizable to me. There isn't any coastline. The whole thing is just lines and green representing fields. Scott wades into this thing and explains to his audience of soldiers that they will attack here and sweep up through here. He knows all the names and knows how to pronounce them. It's a very impressive demonstration of the immense familiarity they all must have had for their areas (and contrast this with the cavalier attitude of Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979): "Isn't that near Din Van Dock or Drin Vin Lung? All these gook names sound the same to me!")

I also like the way the film is shot by Fred Koenekamp. Patton has the distinction of being the first film about the North African campaign, that was actually shot, well, near, the actual location, in Spain. I love all the wide-angle shots incorporating all the cactus and succulents which dot the landscape. There is a trick that they use here of always following any cars which drive up to any building with the widest angle lens possible. They seem to drive around and around and around before they stop. The capturing of some of the locations both in summer and wintertime France are simply stunning.

The comparison with Lawrence is interesting. In Lean's film, a brilliant scholar discovers that war appeals to a dark side of his nature and is horrified by it. Whereas in Patton, the entire structure of the film is a portrait of a man who is really only fulfilled when he is leading troops into battle. However, our hero never really gets out there to "do his stuff." It's maddening in a way. The famous advance toward Berlin of the Third Army under Patton's leadership is handled in sort of a perfunctory montage accompanied by the most full-bodied rendering of Jerry Goldsmith's musical score. For me, they devised a great scene showing Patton leading his men is during the Third Army advance: he discovers tanks have bogged down at a muddy crossroads. Patton issues orders to unsnarl the situation, then there are several minutes of footage of him playing traffic cop — it's wonderful.

So this film shows the warrior/leader George S. Patton all dressed up with no place to go. I mean, In Lawrence, the pacifist hero is actually shown blowing somebody's head off! This is one of the reasons I suppose I find Patton so compelling. Even in the midst of the biggest war mankind has ever known, they had no place for this consummate warrior.

Patton as drawn by George C, Scott, is the model male leader. Everything this man does seems calculated to create an impression on the men under his command. Create an impression with the maximum amount of preening, naturally. He has all the talismans and rituals of manly behavior: from the way his orderlies enter a new, bullet-riddled command post and set up his flags, to the way he insults his fellow officers with a smile and a wink, men react favorably to this man. Because this is how the big dogs play the game. It's how they have been playing the game for a thousand years (or longer!). When we spend time with someone like that, we feel as if a little of it rubs off on us; they influence us. We can do what we must do.

© 1970, 20th-Century Fox Film Corporation, All Rights Reserved.

And all of this was as compelling to the audiences of Vietnam War-torn America as it is today. I recently attended a showing of the film at the Academy's Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills. The occasion was the presentation of a new 70mm print (I chanced to overhear the Academy's film archivist say, "The Academy would like to have a good print of all the Best Picture winners.").

Patton doesn't open with the Fox logo. It opens with that famous shot of Old Glory just about filling the frame. Just as soon as this image appeared, the audience burst into applause; applause for the Stars and Bars! Who would have thunk it!

And there we sat for the next 2 and a half hours as we went on an excursion that only the movies can take us on. Patton is unusual, even for the time in which it was made. Its dramatic structure and visual strategies are quite different. The audience is lulled into it almost, and despite some terribly studio-bound lighting in the interiors, we all completely forget we are watching a movie at all. No one notices the lighting or footage that doesn't match.

The INTERMISSION comes along. The audience stretches. They are notably quieter than usual — they've been rudely yanked back into the 21^st Century. It seems even stranger than usual to hear someone ask, "Seen any good movies?" And the answer is, "I though Shallow Hal was funny."

By the time it is over, we all stagger out into the night, each of us asking in our own way, "Why can't films be as good as Patton was tonight?" It's weird. That melancholy feeling Patton has during the last hour of the film is transferred to all of us in the audience who love the accomplishments of films of this era. Many of us are dressed up with all of our knowledge of film, and we have no where to go with it. But we have to struggle on anyway, because, "George would have wanted it that way!"

11.19.01