Old Blood and Guts

Patton advances a highly original thesis: the villain of World War II was not Germany, but Britain. The movie's hero, General George S. Patton (George C. Scott), is distantly analyzed by little Goethes in Nazi uniforms. They pronounce him "a magnificent anachronism" and America's most fearsome belligerent. The British, on the other hand, are all whining limeys whose vindictive leader, Field Marshal Montgomery, nourishes his ego on the bones of American troops. One can imagine an equally distorted British interpretation mounting Monty as a knight-errant and Patton as a gorilla.

Patton opens with the general's famous exhortation to the troops: "I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." Brimming with messianic zeal, the movie general struts about North Africa as if he imagined himself a Carthaginian commander. And that is precisely what the real Patton thought he was. A mirror-gazing mystic, Patton believed in reincarnation and wrote odes to himself in his other lives. Today such attitudes in a draftee might bar him from service; yesterday they served to propel a general to victories.

Obliging Windmill. Director Franklin Schaffner's previous epic was Planet of the Apes. Patton sometimes seems a postscript, with wide-ranging battle scenes of tanks and air strikes that once again ravage the planet. The script presents Patton as a distorted Quixote, espousing an ancient creed: Hate thine enemy, and never let the home team down. In the end, what truly overtakes Patton is Patton. In a field hospital, the general strikes a battle-fatigued G.I. The shock waves of the slap reverberate back to America, where Congressmen shrill for the general's command. Patton is relieved, and later placed under the authority of his onetime subordinate, Omar N. Bradley, played by Karl Maiden as if he were impersonating a potato.

The actual exploits of Patton in Europe are too outlandish to be fiction. He did indeed liberate 12,000 towns; he did indeed have mules shot when they got in his way. There is no ironist like history; but the film makers will not let hell enough alone. After dodging bullets for three years, Patton was maimed in a peacetime automobile accident. The steel soldier died paralyzed from the neck down. But Patton leaves the general alive, walking across a wide field, wistful and quixotic. A windmill obligingly wheels in the foreground, lest the audience miss the intent.

Public Character. Patton views itself as "a salute to a rebel." The line encapsulates the film's faults. Patton was starved for the superpatriotic rations of the 19th century. It was not necessarily an ignoble hunger, but one can no more rebel backward than one can fall up. The movie's vision blurs the man and, incidentally, the just war around him.

Fortunately, the general is enacted by George C. Scott, who can sense a character in a gross script the way a sculptor can detect a man in a block of marble. Beneath the pompous strutting, Scott understands, was a shrewd playwright who devised and played a public character for his troops. The trouble was that after Patton persuaded his audience, he took in himself; the author and his persona became inseparable. Scott shows that strange, mad process and demonstrates how courage could become, in time, suicidal. General Patton is too complex a period piece to be seen by the film's Viet Nam-informed hindsight. His proper epitaph is Scott's intricate portrayal, and the standard enlisted man's complaint, uttered when Patton became known by the sobriquet "Old Blood and Guts." "Yeah," said the soldiers. "His guts. Our blood."

"I played Patton," says George C. Scott in a voice that sounds like a cartful of coal rumbling up from No. 7 shaft, "because I liked the man. He was a professional, and I admire professionalism. And for whatever else he was, good or bad, he was an individual. That's what's most important to me today, when everybody around seems to be some kind of damn ostrich."

Scott has never had much of a problem keeping his head out of the sand. When lobbying, manipulating and advertising for an Oscar reached fever pitch back in the early '60s, Scott sent a telegram to the Academy withdrawing his name from the nominations. His portrait of Bert Gordon, the ulcerous, vulpine gambler in The Hustler, is one of the modern screen's great essays in villainy, but not surprisingly, Scott failed to receive the Oscar.

He does not really need one, and if he had one he would probably use it as a plumber's helper. At 42, Scott is easily one of the best actors in films today, a varied performer whose chameleon talents can always be counted on to enliven any project with vigor, subtlety and surprise. Or almost any project. Scott has muffed it occasionally. "Hell, I've compromised all my life. Ever see Not With My Wife, You Don't!* But something good always seems to come along sooner or later."

Absolutely No. Perhaps, but the good things do not always come from the predictable places. When Mike Nichols asked him to play a role in Catch-22, Scott declined--with emphasis. "I'd already played that character once when I did Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove. But even if I hadn't done Strangelove, I wouldn't have been in Catch-22. I think the hero, Yossarian, is the biggest cop-out there ever was. What the hell good does it do to take your clothes off, climb a tree and refuse to come down? What kind of rebellion is that?"

Although Scott prepared for Patton by reading and watching newsreels, he has no set theories or prejudices about acting. "Actors," he explains, "are the original atom smashers." In other words, people who break down a character or a human emotion into its tiniest components and then reassemble it. "It's schizophrenic," he says. "The first trap is getting too much of yourself into the part. The second is getting too far removed, too technical. The ideal is a combination of both those elements with something else, the ability to get away from yourself, criticize, be brutal with yourself. It's in that third area right there that so many of our people get into their problems, with booze, with women, with dope. I had a liquor problem myself. But I don't feel any real obligation to break into every jail in the country any more. I guess I've mellowed."

* A dim-witted 1966 service comedy co-starring Tony Curtis and Virna Lisi.

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