As biopics go Patton is an excellent example of its sub-genre concerning historical figures as interpreted for the big screen. It contains a larger-than-life source in General George S. Patton, a conflict of global proportions situated within several World War II theaters of action and it has an excellent lead actor upon whom the entire project rests.

Franklin J. Schaffner directed the film two years after finishing The Planet of the Apes and was benefited terrifically by the contributions of his Oscar-winning production designers, Antonio Mateos, Urie McCleary, Gil Parrondo and Pierre-Louis Thévenet. Their creation of a 1940s-era landscape complete with tanks, munitions, uniforms, ruins and costumes gave credibility to the film as a showcase for performing historical figures who are well known across the world. General Omar N. Bradley appears in the form of Karl Malden, Field Marshall Montgomery is performed by Michael Bates and the "desert rat" himself, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, is given life by Michael Vogler.

All this is to say the details of Scaffner's movie stand up to the demands of believability. The picture is convincing in its environment, well produced in its duration and meaningful in depicting a remarkable and difficult period during global history. It's also padded across its nearly three-hour length with the memorable score of Jerry Goldsmith and a number of re-enacted events from the life and times of General George S. Patton.

Unavoidably, though, the reputation of Patton stems from its lead actor, George C. Scott, who drilled his way into his eponymous role with the skill of years spent as a hardened stage and screen actor. His performance is monumental and stands up to the acclaim heaped upon it while also symbolizing the social conflicts of the United States in 1970.

Opening with the most brilliant pre-credit sequence ever produced, Patton addresses an unseen audience, presumably of his soldiers, and stands in full military regalia with Old Glory as his backdrop. His words capture the essence of war in defeating one's enemy without failure or regret. The speech also sets up his character as an entirely confident, charismatic and single-minded individual bent on success. Later scenes recuperate him as a tactician and blustering leader who has an equally profound appreciation of mysticism and reincarnation with the refinement of being a bilingual man quite passionate about history.

Still, the opening scene is singular. Shots isolating his saluting right hand, numerous medals, ivory-handled Colt .45, riding boots and eyes make Patton a man larger than the sum of myths that posthumously engulf him. He is the embodiment of contradiction being at once capable of cowing subordinates to irrational demands while still feeling the loss of a single soldier among the thousands at his disposal.

Most surprisingly, and the ineffable thing making Patton different from most other biopics, is the way the named subject's life is concluded off-screen. In this choice screenwriters Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North isolated Patton from his youth and death by restricting the movie to his various commands in World War II. All references to West Point, his innovation as a World War I tank commander, his activities as a peacetime thorn in the side of his superiors or his eventual death in a car accident after Allied victory in 1945 are left off-screen. So is the larger share of his personal life including his wife and family.

The result of segmenting Patton's life is to accept our on-screen confinement for increased story-telling success and a greater sense of spectacle. We are involved with Scott's version of Patton and see him as a conflicted and difficult man with considerable talents along with a number of faults. He isn't sainted or ridiculed, blindly celebrated or wholly criticized. Instead he is well rounded as a character, acting in a moment of particular historical tension that made him a fore in changing the world.

Significantly the film is remembered for its detailed representation of World War II-era battles but also for Scott's refusal of his Best Actor Academy Award. Calling the entire competition a, "meat parade," one apocryphal story says he was told he'd won the Oscar by a phone call received by his son Campbell, who has since become an actor in his own right. After receiving the news, Scott finished watching a hockey game on TV and then went to bed without ever making an effort to pick up the award that remains uncollected even after the actor's death.

This rejection of Hollywood's game was difficult one for the industry to accept. It began a difficult decade of political protests mounted on the globally broadcast Academy Awards TV show and was a portent of how unbalanced Oscar winners could be in the eyes of public opinion that was sometimes widely divergent from Academy voters. In no uncertain terms Patton was a transitional film one for American movies in the transitional year of 1970.

With new screen directions building from the dissolution of the Production Code in favor of the Motion Picture Association of America in the late '60s, the subjects and themes of movies were changing. So were rules about movie finance and the methods used to entice audiences using new genre hybrids and stars as an older generation of film actors and filmmakers were replaced by more youthful competition.

One tension in the moment was the distinction between movies appealing to older audiences and those titles appealing to newer moviegoers. In the former category undeniably belongs Patton that seems to be, from one perspective at least, a pro-Vietnam celebration about a military hero upholding relatively conservative values. Two other Best Picture nominees, Love Story and Airport, also confirmed traditional story-telling modes even as the impulse towards more personal and experimental films was present in the remaining two Best Picture nominees.

Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson's vehicle for Jack Nicholson about a man in conflict with society, and Robert Altman's anti-Vietnam protest film M*A*S*H, set in the Korean War for allegorical purposes, were wildly popular at the box office. Each demonstrated a challenge to prevailing standards of how movies should be made and on what subjects they should be centered. Each starred a number of rising stars and each of them, along with other influential films of the year like Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, contributed to a divide between old and new Hollywood. This divide closely echoed concerns in the wider society then at odds about popular TV programs, political viewpoints, various cultural crises and domestic troubles.

Patton managed to pave its way through these competing concerns with a maverick character that was also firmly in the mold of classical screen heroes. The general is an independent, insubordinate character filled with idealistic worldviews and silly bias much like the privileged Baby Boomers then-separating from their parent's influence. But he was also a dyed-in-the-wool military man and patriot of uncompromising ideals and integrity much like the Depression-era generation coming into the maturity of their golden years and open conflict with their children. Patton's seemingly conflict-ridden sensibility was a symbol of American citizenship in 1970 and made Scott's characterization particularly useful in bridging gaps between hawks and doves, old and young, rich and poor and the hippie and suit.

Of course this resolution is wholly Scott's artistry in giving life to the film's title role as a warmonger with the heart of an aesthete. Were it not for his ability to contain these contradictory elements and fuse them together from embellished twentieth century history the film would have been an utter failure. As it is, Patton remains an important movie worthy of a second look if not outright canonization as one of the great films in American cinema.