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.
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