9 / 10
Official trailer
Patton is one of the great American war films. Seen twice across decades. The 9 rating is what it earns. Franklin J. Schaffner directing. George C. Scott in the title role. Karl Malden as Omar Bradley. The screenplay co-written by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North. Won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay. Scott famously refused his award. 172 minutes documenting General George S. Patton’s North Africa, Sicily, and France campaigns.
The opening speech in front of the giant American flag became one of cinema’s most quoted sequences.
Patton gets me from the first frame. Scott stands in front of that flag and talks for seven minutes, and by the end of it I know exactly who this man is and I’m a little afraid of him. I think it’s the finest opening any war picture has, and the film spends nearly three hours living up to it. My one real gripe is the middle, which drags.
The Setup
The film opens with George S. Patton (George C. Scott) delivering a speech to his troops before an unspecified upcoming operation. He stands before an enormous American flag in dress uniform. He speaks for approximately seven minutes. The speech mixes profanity, patriotism, military theory, and personal philosophy. The audience meets Patton through the speech before the film provides any narrative context.
The narrative begins in February 1943 at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia. American forces have suffered a severe defeat. Patton takes command of II Corps and reorganizes it. The discipline he imposes restores combat effectiveness. He drives the corps through the rest of the North African campaign. The Allied victory in Tunisia clears the path for the invasion of Sicily.
The picture documents Patton’s career across Sicily, the political consequences of the soldier-slapping incidents, his exile to a deception command in England during the run-up to D-Day, his return to combat as commander of the U.S. Third Army, the breakout through France, the Battle of the Bulge, and the eventual race to Berlin that ended with Patton stopping at the Elbe River. The runtime is patient. The film documents both the military accomplishments and the personal compromises.
The Opening Speech
The opening speech is the film’s most studied sequence. George C. Scott delivers approximately seven minutes of material in front of an enormous American flag. The camera holds on him through most of the speech.
He speaks like the actual Patton. Scott did extensive research on Patton’s speaking style, accent, and physical mannerisms. The performance is part impersonation and part interpretation.
The speech is composite. The actual Patton delivered multiple speeches to his troops across the war. The screenplay combines material from several documented speeches into a single sequence. Some phrases come directly from documented Patton statements. Coppola and North wrote other phrases to convey the spirit of Patton’s rhetoric. The audience receives the speech as the character’s introduction without knowing which lines are historical and which are dramatic license.
The speech is also the film’s clearest statement about Patton’s contradictions. He praises courage and condemns cowardice. He celebrates American military culture and the killing required to win wars. He speaks of God and shit in the same sentences.
He compares battle to professional athletics and to religious devotion. The contradictions are the character. The speech sets up the entire film. The man delivering this speech is the man who will be capable of everything that follows.
God and shit in the same breath is the moment I fell for this movie. Scott doesn’t wink at a word of it. He means all of it, and I end up uneasy about how much I enjoy listening to him.
For Writers
The Patton opening speech shows how to introduce a complex character through a single extended monologue. The speech runs seven minutes. The film doesn’t provide any narrative context before or during the speech. The audience meets Patton through his rhetoric and reaches conclusions about him before the plot begins. The lesson for writers is that character can be established through performance instead of through plot. If your character has a strong distinctive voice, you can let the voice do the introduction work.
The audience doesn’t need the film to tell it what to think about the character. The audience can listen and decide. The Patton opening trusts the audience to absorb the contradictions without being walked through them. Most films would have provided expository setup. Patton refused.
The George C. Scott Performance
George C. Scott plays Patton at the peak of his career.
The performance won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Scott refused the award. He’d refused his earlier nomination for The Hustler (1961) for Best Supporting Actor. He believed competitive acting awards damaged the profession by reducing artistic work to commercial competition. The refusal was consistent with his prior position instead of a one-time protest.
The performance is the film. Scott understood that he couldn’t play Patton’s contradictions as confusion. He had to play them as fully integrated personality. The man who slaps soldiers for combat fatigue is the same man who weeps at the dedication of Allied cemeteries. Scott doesn’t signal between these states. He plays them as the same person responding to different stimuli. The integration makes the performance one of cinema’s greatest character studies.
The cemetery scene is the one I’d show anybody who doubts Scott. The man who slaps a sick soldier stands there with wet eyes over the graves, and I never catch Scott switching gears. I think that’s the hardest thing an actor can pull off, and he makes it look like breathing.
Scott’s physical work supports the performance. He approximated Patton’s actual voice through extensive research.
He wore Patton’s uniform style and his ivory-handled pistols. He learned Patton’s reading and writing routines. He spoke the languages Patton spoke (French and Latin appear in the film). The total commitment to inhabiting the historical figure exceeded what most actors of his era attempted. The performance has aged into the definitive cinematic depiction of an American general.
The Karl Malden Performance
Karl Malden plays General Omar Bradley as Patton’s professional opposite. Bradley is calm, deliberate, and politically astute where Patton is volatile and undiplomatic. The two officers were classmates at West Point but had moved through different command tracks during the interwar period. Bradley was reserved by personality and conventional by temperament. Patton was theatrical and unconventional. The contrast between them is the film’s central professional dynamic.
Malden plays Bradley with suitable restraint. The performance is small in comparison to Scott’s. The smallness is the point. Bradley is the kind of officer who succeeds by not drawing attention to himself. Patton is the kind of officer who succeeds by drawing all the attention to himself. Both approaches produced successful careers. Patton became a household name. Bradley became Chief of Staff of the Army and was promoted to five-star General of the Army. The film doesn’t condescend to either officer.
Malden’s broader career included A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), where he won Best Supporting Actor, and On the Waterfront (1954), where he was nominated. Patton is one of his strongest later roles. The performance needs no theatrical fireworks, only the disciplined restraint that anchors Scott’s volcanic Patton in plausible institutional context.
The Soldier-Slapping Incidents
Two soldier-slapping incidents nearly ended Patton’s career, and the film documents both. In Sicily in 1943, Patton struck two soldiers hospitalized for combat fatigue. He called them cowards. He threatened to shoot them. Journalist Drew Pearson reported the incidents. The resulting scandal led to Patton being relieved of field command and assigned to a deception command in England.
Instead of minimizing the incidents, the film treats them seriously. Scott plays Patton’s slapping with full commitment. The audience sees the rage instead of a sanitized version.
The audience also sees the eventual consequence. Patton has to formally apologize to the soldiers and to his entire command. The film shows the apology. It shows the humiliation. The film refuses to soften Patton’s worst behavior or his later accountability for it.
The apology is a big part of why this gets a 9 from me. Watching Patton swallow his pride in front of his whole command is harder to sit through than any battle in the picture, and I respect a film that makes its hero do that on camera.
The treatment is one of the film’s clearest achievements.
Most biographical war films of the 1970 period would have either omitted the slapping incidents or treated them as misunderstandings. Patton documents them as documented historical events with serious institutional consequences. The audience receives Patton as a complete person instead of as a celebrated figure with the inconvenient parts removed.
The Francis Ford Coppola Screenplay
Francis Ford Coppola co-wrote the screenplay with Edmund H. North.
Coppola was a young screenwriter at the time. He hadn’t yet directed The Godfather (1972). The Patton assignment came from his work on You’re a Big Boy Now (1966) and his collaboration with Roger Corman. The Twentieth Century Fox studio paid him approximately $50,000 for the screenplay. The fee was modest by 1970 standards but significant for a writer at his career stage.
Coppola’s contribution included the opening speech and the wider structural decision to use Patton’s military philosophy as the film’s organizing principle. The film documents the historical events from Patton’s perspective instead of from a neutral documentary perspective. The structural choice gives the film its dramatic energy. The audience is inside Patton’s understanding of the war instead of watching the war from outside.
The screenplay won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (the basis for the award category was research-based original work instead of direct adaptation from a single book).
The screenplay drew on Ladislas Farago’s biography Patton: Ordeal and Triumph and on A Soldier’s Story by Omar Bradley himself. The combination of sources produced a screenplay that was both historically informed and dramatically structured. Coppola later directed The Godfather. The Patton screenplay was his career breakthrough.
The Franklin Schaffner Direction
Franklin Schaffner came to Patton after Planet of the Apes (1968). His broader filmography includes The Best Man (1964), Papillon (1973), and other productions. Schaffner was a competent commercial filmmaker instead of an auteur. The Patton assignment rewarded his particular discipline. The film required disciplined handling of a difficult subject with a difficult lead actor.
The direction is patient and unobtrusive. The camera holds on Scott during the major performance sequences. The combat sequences are clean instead of spectacular. The location work is functional. Schaffner doesn’t impose a visual style on the material. The material itself provides the visual interest. The choice is correct for the production. A more stylized director would have damaged the film by competing with the performances.
Where I get restless is the middle stretch, with Patton cooling his heels in England. I’d have trimmed a good twenty minutes there. The film knows he’s miserable and bored, and for a while it lets me be bored right along with him.
The production filmed across multiple European locations. Spain doubled for North African and European settings. The Spanish army provided period equipment and extras.
The cooperation supported the realism that became the film’s signature. The production economy was significant. The film was made for approximately $12 million in 1970 dollars. It made approximately $61 million at the box office. The financial return was serious.
For Writers
Patton refuses to soften its subject’s worst behavior. The film documents the soldier-slapping incidents as documented historical events. It shows the personal arrogance. It shows the political failures. It shows the professional brilliance alongside all of it. The film doesn’t ask the audience to forgive or condemn, only to receive the complete person. The lesson for writers is that biographical fiction works better when it refuses to choose between celebration and condemnation.
If your subject is celebrated, your fiction has to include the flaws that complicated the celebration. If your subject is condemned, your fiction has to include the achievements that produced the celebration to begin with.
Patton holds both meanings across 172 minutes. The discipline required is enormous, and it produces the best biographical war film America has made.
The Cold War Context
Patton reached theaters in 1970, during the height of opposition to the Vietnam War.
The choice to celebrate a flag-waving World War II general was politically charged. Different audiences received the film differently. Vietnam War supporters embraced Patton as a model of American military virtue. Vietnam War opponents read the film as critique of military culture instead of as celebration. The film accommodates both readings.
The dual readability is the screenplay’s most lasting achievement. Coppola and North wrote a film that celebrates Patton’s military effectiveness while documenting the personal and political costs of his approach. Audiences who wanted celebration found celebration. Audiences who wanted critique found critique. The film is one of the cleaner examples of a work that’s both endorsement and indictment of its subject.
President Nixon was an enthusiastic supporter of the film.
He watched Patton multiple times during the planning for the Cambodia invasion in 1970. The widely reported viewings produced specific cultural commentary about whether the film had influenced military policy. The implication was overstated. Nixon admired Patton as character but didn’t derive operational decisions from the film. The cultural moment remains as evidence of how the film worked in 1970 American politics.
The Ending
The final scenes find Patton at the end of the European war. He’s reached the Elbe River and stopped per orders. The Russian army is approaching from the east. Patton wants to keep going.
He believes the Soviet Union will be the next enemy and that the moment to defeat them is before they consolidate their occupation of Eastern Europe. He’s overruled. The war is over. Patton’s command is being demobilized.
The closing voice-over is Patton’s. He reflects on Roman generals returning from successful campaigns. The triumphal march. The slave whispering “all glory is fleeting” into the general’s ear. The historical reference is the film’s argument about Patton himself. The glory was fleeting. Patton died in a car accident in Germany on December 21, 1945, approximately eight months after the European war ended. He never returned to the United States in triumph. The voice-over closes the film on his understanding of his own situation.
That voice-over is my favorite thing in the picture after the speech. The slave whispering in the general’s ear is the perfect last word for this man, and it’s a gift that the film trusts me to know how his story ended.
The actual Patton’s death isn’t depicted in the film. The closing voice-over and the historical reference let the audience supply the knowledge. Audiences who know Patton’s biographical fate read the ending as foreshadowing of his death. Audiences who don’t know the biographical fate read the ending as professional reflection on aging out of a career. Both readings are correct. The film accommodates both.
Craft: One Of The Great American War Films
Craft Note
Patton works at peak across multiple departments. The George C. Scott Academy Award-winning performance is one of cinema’s great character studies. The Karl Malden supporting work grounds the institutional context. The Coppola-North screenplay won the Academy Award and remains studied as biographical adaptation. The Franklin Schaffner direction is disciplined and unobtrusive. The Jerry Goldsmith score with the famous Patton main theme has become one of cinema’s recognized military themes.
Seven Academy Awards went to the film, including Best Picture and Best Director. The sweep was considerable. The recognition was earned. The film’s reputation has aged into one of the strongest American war films and one of the strongest biographical films of any genre. Later productions including Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Band of Brothers (2001) owe structural debts to Patton’s approach to the European theater.
The 9 rating is what it earns. The film doesn’t reach 10 because the pacing in some middle sequences reflects 1970 conventions that later filmmaking has compressed, and the celebration of military culture has aged in complicated ways. The structural and performance achievements remain undeniable. The film is essential viewing for anyone interested in war cinema, in biographical adaptation, or in George C. Scott’s career.
Does Patton still hold up?
A 9, and it’d be a 10 if the middle moved faster.
Scott gives the best performance I know of in a war picture, the opening speech raises the hair on my arms, and the film has the nerve to show its hero slapping a sick kid and then apologizing for it. The England stretch sags, and some of the flag-waving plays older than the rest. Everything else is as good as American war movies get.
