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Fortunately, the general is enacted by George C. Scott, who can sense a character in a gross script the way a sculptor can detect a man in a block of marble. Beneath the pompous strutting, Scott understands, was a shrewd playwright who devised and played a public character for his troops. The trouble was that after Patton persuaded his audience, he took in himself; the author and his persona became inseparable. Scott shows that strange, mad process and demonstrates how courage could become, in time, suicidal. General Patton is too complex a period piece to be seen by the film's Viet Nam-informed hindsight. His proper epitaph is Scott's intricate portrayal, and the standard enlisted man's complaint, uttered when Patton became known by the sobriquet "Old Blood and Guts." "Yeah," said the soldiers. "His guts. Our blood."
"I played Patton," says George C. Scott in a voice that sounds like a cartful of coal rumbling up from No. 7 shaft, "because I liked the man. He was a professional, and I admire professionalism. And for whatever else he was, good or bad, he was an individual. That's what's most important to me today, when everybody around seems to be some kind of damn ostrich."
Scott has never had much of a problem keeping his head out of the sand. When lobbying, manipulating and advertising for an Oscar reached fever pitch back in the early '60s, Scott sent a telegram to the Academy withdrawing his name from the nominations. His portrait of Bert Gordon, the ulcerous, vulpine gambler in The Hustler, is one of the modern screen's great essays in villainy, but not surprisingly, Scott failed to receive the Oscar.
He does not really need one, and if he had one he would probably use it as a plumber's helper. At 42, Scott is easily one of the best actors in films today, a varied performer whose chameleon talents can always be counted on to enliven any project with vigor, subtlety and surprise. Or almost any project. Scott has muffed it occasionally. "Hell, I've compromised all my life. Ever see Not With My Wife, You Don't!* But something good always seems to come along sooner or later."
Absolutely No. Perhaps, but the good things do not always come from the predictable places. When Mike Nichols asked him to play a role in Catch-22, Scott declined—with emphasis. "I'd already played that character once when I did Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove. But even if I hadn't done Strangelove, I wouldn't have been in Catch-22. I think the hero, Yossarian, is the biggest cop-out there ever was. What the hell good does it do to take your clothes off, climb a tree and refuse to come down? What kind of rebellion is that?"