One of the great dungers

Press, 27 June 1989, Page 19

One of the great dungers

George C. Scott has a lot to answer for. It was his forceful portrayal of the American general, George S. Patton, in the 1969 film “Patton!” which is credited by some American journalists with having nerved President Richard M. Nixon to undertake the disastrous invasion of Cambodia, which, together with Nixon and Kissinger’s illegal and secret bombing of that tragic country, led directly to its subjection to the bestial Pol Pot and his gang of madmen.

Well, Nixon fell from power eventually, albeit for a far more trivial crime, and Nemesis caught up in due course with George C. Scott. They cast him in “The Last Days of Patton,” a made-for-televison movie shown on Two last Saturday night, and a film which can be described, without calling on any excess reserves of emotion, as one of the great dungers of all time. The pity of it is that there is quite a good story in Patton’s last days. Having shown himself to be a vainglorious and insensitive brute as a human being, with an irresistible appetite for flattery in the press, but at the same

time a brilliant and daring general who contributed greatly to the Allied victory in the West in 1944 and 1945, Patton was appointed Military Governor of Bavaria after the German surrender. He immediately became controversial by his decision to retain the basic structures of civilian administration in Bavaria, which by their very nature were crawling with Nazis, in the teeth of the Allied programme of de-Nazifi-cation.

This brought Patton into conflict with his old friend Eisenhower and led to his eventual dismissal. The arguments in favour of his actions cannot be simply dismissed, however repellent they must have seemed to most people at the time and since, and there is interest and pathos in the situation of a man who finds himself in a position where the very qualities which have led him to it make him utterly unsuitable to hold it.

However the makers of “The Last Days of Patton” decided that they would only touch briefly on these issues at the beginning of the film, and went instead for a soap opera, endless-hospital-bedside-scenes approach, which made the film for most of its wearisome length seem like nothing so much as a particularly uninteresting episode of “Days of Our Lives” or “The Young and the Restless.” Indeed, the film should have been called “The Flat On His Back and Restless.” Shortly after his dismissal Patton was involved in an odd sort of motor accident (confusingly shot in the film so that it was impossible to work out

what had actually happened), broke his neck, was paralysed, got worse and died. We were shown all sorts of gruesome details about how he had to have clamps on his skull and hooks in his jawbones in order to provide traction on his spine. And Eva Marie Saint was constantly at his bedside.

There is not much to be gained from showing people dying in hospital, unless they do it with great nobility, or vouchsafe some revealing insights, or make some good jokes. None of these applied to the manner of Patton’s passing. But there was, of course, plenty of room for sentimentality, and that, no doubt, is why we got the better part of two hours of it. At the start of the film we saw Patton standing up in his jeep. For most of the rest of the film he was lying flat on his back in a hospital. It would have been a better film if it had started off with him standing up in a hospital and ended with him lying flat on his back in a jeep. That, of course, would have been a falsification of history, but one that this reviewer would have found it in his heart to forgive.