There is a moment early in Patton when George C. Scott stands alone on a North African battlefield the morning after the fighting has ended. The dead are everywhere. He surveys the carnage with something that is not quite horror and not quite satisfaction but something uncomfortably close to joy. He quotes Plutarch. He is, in that moment, exactly what the film has been telling us he is — a man who was born in the wrong century and knows it, and has never fully forgiven the world for that fact.
That scene tells you more about General George S. Patton Jr. than any biography written about him, and it takes about forty-five seconds. Franklin J. Schaffner directed this film with complete assurance, and Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North wrote it without a wasted scene. Neither of them tells you what to think. They just show you the man and step back.
The film opens, famously, with Patton addressing his troops — and us — in front of an American flag so enormous it fills the entire screen. He is in full dress uniform, ribbons and medals stacked to his chin, pearl-handled revolvers at each hip. He tells us that Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. He uses language that was startling for 1970 and remains bracing today. The speech runs six minutes and there is not a frame of it to spare. By the time he finishes, we know the man. The rest of the film — all two hours and fifty-two minutes of it — is the proof of what we have been told.
The story follows Patton through the North African campaign of 1943, through Sicily, through the run across France, through the Battle of the Bulge and into Germany. It is the story of one of the most brilliant and most difficult military commanders in American history, a man whose genius for armored warfare was matched only by his genius for making powerful enemies. He slaps a hospitalized soldier he accuses of cowardice and loses command of his army. He gives a speech implying that postwar governance should belong to the Americans and the British and not the Russians, and is removed from command again. He wins battles that his superiors would have been content to let grind on for months. He is, depending on who is watching him, a monster or a hero or both simultaneously.
Scott’s performance is one of the great ones. He refused the Academy Award for Best Actor — on principle, he said, opposing the competitive nature of awards — and the Academy gave it to him anyway. Right call. What Scott does here is not impersonate Patton or channel him in the way actors talk about their process. He just becomes him. There is no visible effort, no moment where you catch him working. The performance has no seams. He simply is the man.
Karl Malden plays General Omar Bradley with a quietness that earns its own respect. Bradley is the man who admires Patton, understands him, and keeps getting handed the wreckage. Malden is so steady in the role that his scenes with Scott turn into something you do not expect from a war film — two men who genuinely like each other, deeply at odds about what the job actually demands. Neither one wins those arguments.
What makes Patton endure is not the battle sequences, impressive as they are. It is the question the film refuses to answer: Is this man admirable? He wins wars. He drives his soldiers past the point of human endurance and asks them to be grateful for it. He believes in reincarnation and is entirely serious about it. He is vain, profane, devout, brilliant, and occasionally monstrous. The film presents all of this without judgment and without the comfort of a verdict. Richard Nixon watched it repeatedly in the White House, reportedly transfixed. Whether he was inspired or warned is a question the film deliberately leaves open.
That is why it still matters. We keep having the same argument about what we want from the people who lead us — whether results justify the damage, whether brilliance excuses cruelty, whether a man who wins by breaking every rule deserves the win. Patton does not settle that argument. It just puts the most extreme version of it on screen and runs it for nearly three hours. Richard Nixon watched it over and over at the White House, sometimes dragging Kissinger along. Nobody has ever fully explained what Nixon thought he was learning. That ambiguity is the film’s greatest achievement. Fifty-five years on, it still has not resolved.
Jerry Goldsmith’s score is built around a military march and a pipe organ, which sounds strange until you hear it and realize it is exactly right — a general and a medieval crusader occupying the same body, scored accordingly. The Library of Congress put Patton in the National Film Registry in 2003. Seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. George C. Scott declined his. The film did not need it anyway.
