Patton was the focus of the epic 1970 Academy Award-winning film Patton, with the title role played by George C. Scott in an iconic, Academy Award winning performance. The film was a huge commercial success, and spawned fierce critical debates over the accuracy of its portrayal of General Patton.
Screenwriters Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North wrote most of the film based on two biographies, General Bradley's A Soldier's Story and Ladislas Farago's Patton: Ordeal and Triumph. General Bradley also served as a military advisor and consultant to the film's producers. As the film was made without access to General Patton's diaries or any information from his family, it largely relied upon observations by Bradley and other military contemporaries when attempting to reconstruct Patton's thoughts and motives. In a review of the film Patton, S.L.A. Marshall, who knew both Patton and Bradley, stated that "The Bradley name gets heavy billing on a picture of comrade that, while not caricature, is the likeness of a victorious, glory-seeking buffoon...Patton in the flesh was an enigma. He so stays in the film...Napoleon once said that the art of the general is not strategy but knowing how to mold human nature...Maybe that is all producer Frank McCarthy and Gen. Bradley, his chief advisor, are trying to say." Bradley himself acknowledged that the two men were polar opposites in personality, and there is little doubt that Bradley despised Patton's swashbuckling method of leading the men under his command. Bradley's role in the film remains controversial to this day.
Some historians have accused the film of exaggerating Patton's negative traits, particularly the repeated portrayal of Patton as a commander whose desire for military glory on the battlefield overrode any need to limit unnecessary casualties by the men under his command. These scenes are criticized as contemporary revisionism, a token to the widespread antiwar sentiment of the time (it was released during the apex of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War). Others see the movie's treatment of Patton as too reverential and hagiographic. These critics often discern in the film a thinly disguised attempt to glorify the military by portraying Patton as an inspirational leader, a commander whose bold plans to conquer Germany and end the war were constantly sabotaged by higher command as well as his military inferiors on the battlefield.
Many Patton contemporaries, including those who knew him personally or served with him, have applauded Scott's characterization of Patton for accurately capturing the essence of the man – war-loving, egotistical, overbearing, obsessive, conflicted, and enigmatic, yet unrivalled in his ability to inspire and lead large forces of men in a desperate and ultimately victorious struggle against a determined enemy.
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