Final Information Guide
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PA* T** TO*N .20th * **Century^Fox * ROADSHOW RELEASE FILMED AND PRESENTED IN DIMENSION-ISO FINAL INFORMATION GUIDE News Bureaus Box 900, Beverly Hills, California 90213 444 West 56th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019 PREFACE "/ don't yield to any man in my reverence to the Lord but Goddamnit! no sermon needs to take longer than 10 minutes." George S. Patton, Jr. Pattern is controversy burned into film, a closeup portrayal of will under strain, of oversized figures, the tale of perhaps the most aggressive and flamboyant commander ever to wear an American uniform and his command relationship with cool-headed, courageous Omar N. Bradley, first his subordinate finally his superior and today the only surviving five-star general of World War II. Patton is the story of a warlord, a samurai, a millionaire soldier whose career reads like a fever chart, a man with flinty courage, big hurts and a scathing tongue, a superpatriot who was also anti-Establishment of another ilk. In the popular image the great commanders are dazzling figures, standing on their mounds at the edge of battle and guiding its cold currents and compulsive course, bending a million men to their will, mocking fear and death. They are unique characters to be sure, they are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, however, but bound by the elements of war. George S. Patton read history and quoted Seneca and Napoleon. He liberated more territory than any other Allied commander in World War II, was a proconsul of a a piece of African real estate he called a mixture of the Bible and Hollywood, yelled defiances against Field Marshal Edwin Rommel into the desert wind, slapped a common soldier and was demoted in a move that even dumbfounded Adolf Hitler. He ran an army in ways his superiors thought was not always wise; he spoke out on issues he thought he had a right to bring up and he took positions that were not popular at the time. He was America's hero at war's end and the Army's hottest potato six months later when he died in an auto accident on a rain-slick highway in the country he had conquered. Patton is the story of a man who didn't travel with the crowd. 9m Gen. George S. Gen. Omar N. Bradley Patton, Jr. (Karl Maiden) (George C. Scott) Field Marshal Field Marshal Bedell Smith Bell Truscott Bernard Montgomery Edwin Rommel (Ed Binns) (Lawrence Dobkin) (John Doucette) (Miehael Bates) (Karl Michael Vogler) Meeks Davenport Jenson Steiger Tank Commander (James Edwards) (Frank Latimore) (Morgan Paull) (Siegfried Ranch) (Clint Ritchie) Codman Carver Hansen Welkin Soldier Who Gets Slapped (Paul Stevens) (Michael Strong) (Stephen Young) (Peter Barkworth) (Tim Considine) Alexander Sergeant Mimms Bridges De Gningand Willie (Jack Gwillim) (Bill Hickman) (Cass Martin) (Douglas Wilmer) (Willie) Why "Ration"? By George C. Scott The people in pain today are the children of the pain of the Second World War; they don't understand it, but they're not alone. We didn't understand it either. Patton possessed qualities and elements in his personality that are sadly lacking today, in men today. In our leaders, our gods, our — oh what a strange word to use! — our heroes, such qualities in dimension are lacking. Immortality of individuality is one of the gifts of God — if there is a God. At least it's a gift of mankind and history and this man had this. Everybody said that General Patton, even 25 years ago, was a 16th Century personality. I chose to believe in a film saying something about this man. And what has this man to say? That there is no safety in numbers. You live and you die alone — he knew it and lived it. To me the most reprehensible thing about young people today is the herd instinct. To form together like cattle which means denying the beauty of the individual soul and personality. This, I think, may be the only message this man has to give to us. If that is the only message, it's the Goddamndest finest one we've had come along in a long time. I'm not talking about the respect of the individual and the absolute rejection of the cattle instinct that apparently possesses and obsesses young people today. Inwardly we should perhaps think about what war is. We have lived countless hundreds of years and apparently have not found the secret of living together as rational human beings. The history of this last quarter century might have read a little differently if anyone had listened to a man like Patton. It is my conviction that had Patton been in charge, the war would have been perceptibly shortened, with thousands and thousands less casualties, and our position as far as the taking of Prague, the taking of Berlin would have been different. Our position today would have been different as regards to Russia. Anybody can 'if history. I'm not trying to do that. What I'm trying to say is, suppose we had had the foresight to go along with him? It's such a fascinating prospect, the mind cannot refuse to deal with it and to think about it. But foremost, about Patton, I believe this man was an individual in the deepest sense of the word. And the beauty of the individual soul and the individual personality is the message, isn't it? The Stars Sparks /Jv \vhen George C. Scott appears and, like the man he portrays in Putton, he has a way of getting under people's skin. The explosive Mr. Scott, as he has been called, is Pattern, period. His handling of the Slapping Scene was one of many examples. "This was a scene separating the men from the boys," said director Franklin J. Schaffner in yet another compliment to the actor. Another highlight that had blase film technicians break out in spontaneous applause when it was filmed was the opening sequence. Here, Scott acted out a lengthy (IM-script page) monologue so flawlessly that only one master take was needed. It is a measure of his talents that George Campbell Scott has remained untyped, shifting with equal success from Shakespeare comedy to poolroom realism, from on and off-Broadway to Hollywood and back again. Patton is only Scott's eighth film. Born in Wise County, Va., Scott reached stardom as a heavy and earned soaring acclaim as a superbly cynical gambler in "The Hustler," as an ice-eyed policeman who stalked Sir Lawrence Olivier in TV's "The Power and the Glory," as a rasping, vicious prosecutor in Broadway's "The Andersonville Trial" — not to forget his incarnation of the Pentagon general who would rather see the world blow up in nuclear war than condemn strategy in "Dr. Strange-love." Scott last appeared on Broadway in Neil Simon's outrageously funny play, "Plaza Suite." KARL MALDEN came to the role of Omar N. Bradley with an acting experience honed in 30 films, yet after two months in the flesh of the "G.I. General," the actor with the imposing nose said he was still learning. A lesson in restraint, he said. Before undertaking the task of playing the only living U.S. five-star general, Maiden visited the 76-year-old former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to learn everything he could. Going over the script one day, Maiden said "but General, there is one scene where I have to explode!" The scene, filmed in Northern Spain in April, shows Bradley having it out with Patton, saying in a last exasperated moment, "No, I didn't pick you, Ike picked you." The line really hurts and Maiden felt instinctively he should play it with a raised voice. "Don't raise the voice, just look him straight in the eyes and say it, very calmly," Bradley told Maiden. A vigorous actor who brings an inquiring mind to whatever interests him, Maiden says acting is something you don't talk about, but something you do. Knowledge of people is implicit in his acting. There's one great thing that you men can say when it's all over, and you're home once more. You can thank God that twenty years from now, when you're sitting by the fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks what you did in the war, you won't have to shift him to the other knee, cough, and say, "I shoveled crap in Louisiana." — Patton Hum K.I I I M.ildrn Slxcnla\i DII M.ni 11 22. \»\ in (i.nx . Indiana, tin son <>l ,i \u<;usla\. In- nun nl ,i /me alMctc ;il school and it \s an athletic scholarship lluil took him In the \ikansas St.vtc Tcac'/ier'.s College. I'"'" \cars later, he left for Chicago to attend tin- Goodman InstHule dramatic classes. paving hi.s \vav l>\\g professional basketball. There he got an intoxicating \\hiil of gveusevKiinl, changed his name to Maiden and lit out for New York and the Big White Way. Despite the usvuiA disappointments. Maiden made steady progress from the Group Theater's production of "Golden Boy," to the Actor's Studio and forged several friendships which were to last a lifetime: Richard Widmark, EJia Kazan and Marlon Brando, to name a few. When Kazan became a Broadway director, he used Maiden whenever he could. The breakthrough, of course, was "A Streetcar Named Desire," not only for Maiden, but for Brando and the little-known playwright, Tennessee Williams. As Pcitton is war from the command hill, both Patton and Bradley are surrounded by staff officers, portrayed by such stage and film character actors as Michael Strong, Paul Stevens, Morgan Paull, Stephen Young and Frank Latimore.