Word: patton
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...