CINEMA
War lord
TREVOR GROVE
Patton: Lust for Glory (Casino, 'A')
The Shameless Old Lady (IcA)
The Deserter and the Nomads (Cameo-Poly, `X') George S. Patton Jr was the American General who, as the Germans came to think and as future historians might well conclude, drove himself and bullied his men into be- coming the Allies' most formidable field com- mander in the Second World War., to be ranked above Montgomery and Bradley and equal only to another tank man, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Patton: ,Lust for Glory, Franklin J. Schaffner's inordinately full-length (171 minutes) portrait of the General, comes down neither for nor against such a conclusion. It is in every sense a balanced portrait: objective and to a surpris- ing, though not wholly satisfying, degree (since it is after all an American film) fair, but marred perhaps by an over-zealous con- cern that for each plus there should be a corresponding minus, for each heartwarming tit, a dollop of offending tat.
Somewhere between the tits and tats is the man in the middle, and despite the film's shrewd and penetrating attempts to pin him down, in particular a script of unswerving (if occasionally too quotable) excellence from Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North, he survives largely unscathed: the apotheosis of the big-boned, bunch-fisted American fighting man and, as played by a cigar-chewing George C. Scott, about as thin-skinned as one of those monstrous metal war-machines which since the war have borne his name.
But if Schaffner's hits are limited to flesh wounds, they are nevertheless exceedingly palpable_and, within the limitations of this kind of exercise, Patton is a remarkable film —professional, serious and scrupulously attentive where we have long conic to expect the American war movie to be merely pro- fessional, vulgar and weirdly implausible. And beyond the prosaic catalogue of events —the us defeat at Kasserine Pass (luminous, grey-green shots of the North African desert at dawn, a band of Arab pillagers moving silently and expertly among the dead); a stunningly colourful march-past by the Moroccan army, all baggy pants. fierce moustachios and bright red spats; Patton's record-breakihg dash across France to relieve Bastogne—beyond all this undeniably film- able material, may one not discern a whiff of something altogether more significant, even unfilmable, a dose of Higher Purpose perhaps? One may indeed.
For it is not only Mr Scott's winning per- formance, by turns sneering and slack-lidded, grim-faced and cowed, that suggests in Patton a figure of heroic, even tragic proportions. The entire film has been designed to accom- modate and illuminate the vagaries of this strained, unnatural, severely warlike man, whose heroism lies in the immense scope and weight of his vanity. The camera catches him unawares in an extraordinary pre-battle robing scene, part chivalrous and suggestive of a knight's arming before a joust, partly allusive of a newer, more truly American tradition as he straps on a pair of ivory- handled revolvers and contemplates a duel in■ the sun. tank pitted againsjani,,r'ith Rommel. As his—eyes "peer at—the smooth:. jawed reflection in the mirror (a scene, as in a sense is the whole performance, strongly reminiscent of Marlon Brando's role in Re- flections in a Golden Eye), his thoughts, one might suspect, are Lear's: 'I will do such things,/What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be/The terrors of the earth ...'
The tragedy—and it partakes a good deal of bathos—is that, despite Patton's extra- ordinary, vainglorious achievements, it is clear even to him that while wars may be fought by great commanders, `pure warriors' like himself for whom history has reserved the rare privilege of satisfying a great pub- lic need while pursuing purely private ends. they are won or lost by politicians. Con- stantly baulked by Bradley and Montgomery (a sturdy, bulb-nosed performance from Karl Malden, Michael Bates as a brisk, r-dropping Monty), who understand the political game and use it to serve their own ends, Patton can only pile gaffe on gaffe, slapping a soldier here, insulting his Russian allies there —to the growing displeasure of Eisenhower back in England and to the ultimate foiling of his own, insanely bloodthirsty `destiny'. From being the bullshitting, hooded-eyed. swaggering soldier of the opening shot, set against a backdrop of a huge Stars and Stripes, he winds up rheumy and slump- shouldered; the bulky figure in green battle- dress falls into a kind of dismal slackness, the very posture of defeat.
Though The Shameless Old Lady is an adaptation by Rene Allio (who also directs) of Brecht's story about his grandmother, it is more in the nature of fable than of bio- graphy; a small, semi-precious stone of a film, meticulously faceted to give off half a dozen delicate reflections at every turn of the wrist. The 't.iedle dame indigne' of the title, played with dazzling style and a sharp sense of occasion by the eighty-one year old French actress Sylvie, is mother to five grown-up children; on her husband's death she cuts lose from her own apron strings, sells her shop and all her belongings, starts up a friendship with a prostitute and another with a philosophic cobbler. The children, needless to say, are scandalised.
Her new life, in Brecht's words, 'simply as Mrs B, an unattached person without re- sponsibilities and with modest but sufficient means' lasts just eighteen months. But this brief taste of freedom, it is implied, is more than enough to make up for the previous sixty years of conjugal servitude; and more than enough too, as she enjoys its savour with an immensely dignified and little-old-ladylike gusto, trotting purposefully through the streets of Marseilles on flat black feet in a flat black hat, to merit a visit to the ICA.
Meantime, I have left myself precious little space to comment on some very strange goings-on at the Cameo-Poly, where the Czech director Jena Jakubisko's The Deserter and the Nomads is currently playing. A _wildly coloured extravaganza in three parts. the first two deal with the horrors of violence during periods of revolution and world war, the third with the (gratefully) less bloody horrors of a Fellini-inspired post-holocaust world. A domeheaded, lantern-jawed Death strides through all three episodes, spreading hideous slaughter in the first two but. strangely, love and even laughter in the final one. God, meanwhile, has a look up a girl's skirt. A gloomy but inescapably gripping entertainment, peculiarly of a kind with Ken Russell's Strauss film and, less unexpectedly. displaying throughout all the symptoms of that fierce East European gusto for the grotesque, the savage and the downTiOt cruel.
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