Books, Arts & Manners: Pistol Packin’ Patton

Orwell once wrote that all a critic can really say about any particular work of art is whether he likes it or not. But, as the last thirty or forty years have shown us, a critic can get pretty complicated about it. I remember a review of a film adaptation of a Dreiser book some years back that was so involuted it might as readily have been a critique of Paradise Lost. Yet who remembers the film now or even its title, or for that matter the review? I have always felt that however Ph.D.-sharpened the tools of his trade, the critic has a moral obligation to ask himself three questions about any work he undertakes to examine. First: What are the artist’s intentions? Second: How well does he succeed in his intentions? Only after these two questions are answered may the final question be brought up: What does the critic himself think of the result?

So we come to the film Patton, about the most spectacular and dashing Allied general of World War II. In that war, the warrior Patton found his own personal fulfillment, and, whatever his quirks, his success as a commander of armored divisions was unequaled. Given a free hand, i.e., enough gasoline and supplies, he might actually have thrust through to Berlin in the autumn of 1944 and brought the European war to an end six months earlier. That able producer Frank McCarthy has intended to create Patton on the screen as he was in life and on the battlefield, warts and all. As an aide to General Marshall, McCarthy knew Patton in the war and was able to draw from his own memories in rounding out the portrait.

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Francis Russell

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Orwell once wrote that all a critic can really say about any particular work of art is whether he likes it or not. But, as the last thirty or forty years have shown us, a critic can get pretty complicated about it. I remember a review of a film adaptation of a Dreiser book some years back that was so involuted it might as readily have been a critique of Paradise Lost. Yet who remembers the film now or even its title, or for that matter the review? I have always felt that however Ph.D.-sharpened the tools of his trade, the critic has a moral obligation to ask himself three questions about any work he undertakes to examine. First: What are the artist’s intentions? Second: How well does he succeed in his intentions? Only after these two questions are answered may the final question be brought up: What does the critic himself think of the result?

So we come to the film Patton, about the most spectacular and dashing Allied general of World War II. In that war, the warrior Patton found his own personal fulfillment, and, whatever his quirks, his success as a commander of armored divisions was unequaled. Given a free hand, i.e., enough gasoline and supplies, he might actually have thrust through to Berlin in the autumn of 1944 and brought the European war to an end six months earlier. That able producer Frank McCarthy has intended to create Patton on the screen as he was in life and on the battlefield, warts and all. As an aide to General Marshall, McCarthy knew Patton in the war and was able to draw from his own memories in rounding out the portrait.