Winner '70: First Saw It:		Patton January 19, 2002, on DVD
		Bridesmaids:		Airport, Five Easy Pieces, Love Story, MASH
		My Vote:		MASH, only barely over Five Easy Pieces
		Overlooked:		Discounting foreign films and cult pics, The Landlord and Wanda

Patton
First screened in January 2002 / Most recently screened and reviewed in July 2025

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Director: Franklin J. Schaffner. Cast: George C. Scott, Karl Malden, Stephen Young, Michael Bates, Jack Gwillim, Edward Binns, John Doucette, Karl Michael Vogler, Richard Münch, Siegfried Rauch, Tim Considine. Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North (based on the books Patton: Ordeal and Triumph by Ladislas Farago and A Soldier's Story by Gen. (Ret.) Omar Bradley.).

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In Brief:  Carried along by strong opening, great Scott, and the relative highs in the very up-and-down script and production values.

VOR: ③  Still compelling, in good ways and mixed ones, as an amalgam of scrappy 40s war movies, stodgy 50s epics, and 60s-into-70s malaise.

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Photo © 1970 Twentieth Century Fox

Do I even need to specify that I was visiting my dad? Pretty immersive, though, to watch this movie alongside someone able to pull out Patton's old battle plans from his West Point textbooks and explain them along the way.

As for the movie: it's exciting to see a major commercial profile of a vaunted WWII figure, only a quarter-century after the war, that's willing to dig so complexly into his paradoxes, extremities, ingenuities, and deficits, all without feeling like a "biopic." The post-intermission second half is almost inarguably patchier than the first, and the Oscar-winning editing is a demerit throughout, as if suffering under the producer's mandate to flaunt expenditure and location photography, even if that means 10 establishing shots where one or none would have sufficed. The screenplay zings between the adventurous and pedestrian poles, and even so, a more supple director could have extracted a more disciplined, incisive movie from this same version of that script. But still, Patton is a curious, atypical, impressively involving study of a complex man at the very center and pinnacle of a U.S. war effort too often treated as simple. Grade: B–

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Academy Award Nominations and Winners:
★	Best Picture
★	Best Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
★	Best Actor: George C. Scott
★	Best Original Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola & Edmund H. North
	Best Cinematography: Fred J. Koenekamp
★	Best Art Direction: Urie McClearly & Gil Parrondo; Antonio Mateos & Pierre-Louis Thévenet
★	Best Film Editing: Hugh S. Fowler
	Best Original Score: Jerry Goldsmith
★	Best Sound: Douglas O. Williams & Don J. Bassman
	Best Visual Effects: Alex Weldon
Golden Globe Nominations:
	Best Picture (Drama)
	Best Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
★	Best Actor (Drama): George C. Scott
Other Awards:
	Directors Guild of America: Best Director
	Writers Guild of America: Best Original Screenplay (Drama)
	New York Film Critics Circle: Best Actor (Scott)
	National Society of Film Critics: Best Actor (Scott)
	National Board of Review: Best Picture (English-Language); Best Actor (Scott)

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