Patton (1970)

Patton is a film of the old guard, made at a moment when the old guard was rapidly losing purchase on American culture. Released in 1970, during the height of Vietnam War-era skepticism about military adventurism, this film responded by offering an aesthetically sumptuous, narratively confident portrait of a war hero whose flaws are presented as endearing eccentricities rather than serious moral liabilities. George C. Scott's performance captures a man of appetites and conviction, and the film treats his insubordination and temper not as cautionary signs but as the necessary traits of a man who gets things done. The entire enterprise rests on an assumption that has become increasingly unfashionable: that we can celebrate martial virtue without complication.

The film's representation is entirely traditional, which is to say unremarkable by 1970 standards. It features an all-male ensemble of white actors in positions of authority and consequence. Women appear only as wives and nurses, relegated to the background of a masculine world. There is no interrogation of colonial or imperial attitudes, no consideration of how power operates beyond the battlefield, no suggestion that the world might be organized differently. The film is, in this sense, politically inert by modern standards. It has no interest in the machinery of representation or the questions that have preoccupied serious cultural critics for the past two decades.

What emerges instead is a pure military drama, concerned only with tactics, personality, and the clash of wills between commanders. By contemporary measures, this makes it almost aggressively unconcerned with social consciousness. It is, paradoxically, a film so uninterested in contemporary progressive sensibilities that it achieves a kind of innocence. One cannot accuse it of performing activism it never attempted. It simply wanted to tell the story of a great general, and it did so with considerable craft and conviction.