Making Patton: A Classic War Film's Epic Journey to the Silver Screen by Nicholas Evan Sarantakes (review)
2015; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1548-9922
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoMaking Patton: A Classic War Film's Epic Journey to the Silver Screen Nicholas Evan Sarantakes. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012, xiv, 258 pages. Flardcover $25.80Is there anything original left to say about the classic film Patton? The answer would appear to be quite a lot. Nicholas Evan Sarantakes' engaging and informative monograph, Making Patton, tells the story of the movie's protracted pre-production, dicey production, skillful marketing, and outsized cultural legacy. Delving deeply into studio archives and personal papers, the author provides a model of how to produce cultural history that goes above and beyond mere cultural criticism. A military historian by training, Sarantakes analyzes Flollywood's telling of the life of Patton as seriously as he might analyze one of the general's campaigns. Like the movie itself, it is both seriously entertaining and entertainingly serious, required reading for anyone interested in film history, military history, or their frequent and fruitful intersections.The book's narrative hinges on the remarkable life of the film's producer, Frank McCarthy. By the time he arrived in Hollywood in 1948 at age 36, the Virginia Military Institute graduate had already served as a colonel on George Marshall's staff, dated Winston Churchill's daughter, planned Franklin Roosevelt's funeral, and served briefly as Assistant Secretary of State under James Byrnes. His wartime experiences allowed him to meet both Patton and Twentieth Century-Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck, without either of whom the film could not have been made. McCarthy attached himself to the project in 1951, but faced immediate resistance to any film biography from the general's widow Beatrice and his son George S. Patton IV, neither of whom thought well of the motion picture industry. Their opposition dissuaded the Defense Department from endorsing the project until 1961, at which point John Wayne and Burt Lancaster both expressed strong interest in playing the lead. The 1962 failure of Cleopatra nearly bankrupted the studio, temporarily shelving the project. This proved a blessing in disguise, since - in my own opinion - neither star was right for the part, Lancaster being far too handsome and Wayne being far too John Wayne.An even greater blessing occurred when McCarthy contracted a young and unproven Francis Ford Coppola to write a draft script in 1965 while both were at Universal. This initial script contained nearly all of the film's many iconic lines and most memorable scenes. In subsequent years, a series of additional writers and potential directors cycled through the project - as Patton himself might have put it- like crap through a goose leaving about as lasting an imprint on the project. After McCarthy returned to Fox, Darryl's son Richard Zanuck gave new life to the project by retaining director Franklin Shaffner, who was fresh off the success of 1968's Planet of the Apes. Darryl Zanuck convinced McCarthy to cast the gifted but combatively alcoholic George C. Scott as the lead, which proved triply fortunate. In addition to embodying Patton better than Lancaster or Wayne ever could have done, Shaffner proved to be the rare director who was able to work well with the actor, and - most importantly - Scott preferred the original Coppola script. McCarthy brought in Edmund North, a veteran Hollywood scribe who had served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Europe, to edit the script, removing superfluous scenes and bolstering its historical accuracy and battlefield realism. Sarantakes accurately notes how the final product was an auspicious combination of the complementary creative talents of multiple individuals, though his penchant for providing detailed biographies of each and every one of them interrupts the narrative flow during the book's first half.The actual making of the film in Spain in 1969 is ultimately the least interesting part of the book. For a battlefield epic of its length and scale, production went quite smoothly, the major difficulties centering on the star's drinking and the refusal of snow to fall near Saragossa in a timely manner to enable prompt filming of the climactic Battle of the Bulge scenes. …
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