"May God have mercy on my enemies because I won't."

Franklin Schaffner is one of those directors who throughout his career made very few films, but left an indelible mark on the seventh art. Of the list of fourteen films by him there are two that immediately attract attention. One is "Planet of the Apes", the other is "Patton".

Both have in common having created cinematographic icons easily identifiable by society.

In the first we have Charlton Heston kneeling in front of the Statue of Liberty in one of the best anti-war allegations ever shown on a screen.

In the second we have those 6 minutes of shocking opening speech by George C. Scott with the American flag in the background.

The film was released in 1970, in the middle of the Vietnam War. The most curious thing is that it was seen simultaneously as crude warmongering propaganda and as a pacifist pamphlet. The former emphasized the phrases that Patton recites in his speech or showing him as if he were the last of the romantic heroes.

The seconds affected that Patton was presented, not as a hero, but as a kind of egocentric psychopath with the pretense of a poet who was only happy in war and believed in reincarnation.

The screenplay for "Patton" was initially by Francis Ford Coppola, but later Edmund H. North had to be added. The base story, though authentic, is archetypal: a hero who achieves a feat, falls from grace, rises again performing a greater feat, and falls from grace again.

The music, by Jerry Goldsmith ("Planet of the Apes"), of martial and warlike airs, offers a main theme of solitary trumpets, of great lyricism, that evokes desolation, war and death.

The film has the merit of trying to penetrate the psychology of the controversial character and not just remain in a sample of his exploits. There are sequences in which we see an intimate and abstracted Patton by his poems and his way of seeing life, considering himself an anachronism in a world that is too technologized. Like an ancient medieval warrior-poet whose armor and mount is a tank rather than a horse.

Curiously, the film makes no mention of the fact that he was the first general to have black tankers under his command.

In fact, he expressly requested that the "Black Panthers" Battalion be assigned to him.

In his welcome speech to the unit he told them:

In my army I want the best... I don't care about your skin color as long as you kill those Krauts sons of bitches... Your race watches you, don't let them down and damn don't let me down!

An example of egalitarianism. The darker side of Patton's biography is not shown either. In March 1945, Patton secretly organized Task Force Baum. His mission was to penetrate 80 km into enemy territory and liberate a prison camp where Patton's son-in-law was. The mission was a complete failure.

Finally, that the film concludes with Patton still alive, it only suggests that men like him will continue to exist with each new war that has to come in this existential process of so much human madness.