Director: Franklin Schaffner

If you locked the director of Apocalypse Now in a room with the writer of Sink The Bismark!, you’d expect the result to look something like Patton, a mash-up of the Vietnam-era madness and conventional war bio. (That, or a movie about a giant battleship on acid.) And so it turned out. War leaders have offered rich pickings for biopics, but even James Mason’s measured Desert Fox and Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence would struggle to live with bucketheaded battle genius George Patton as played by George C. Scott. He’s breathtaking in the role that won him his only Oscar: an award he flatly rejected, refusing to compete with other actors. Patton, a man who was in competition with the entire world at one point or other, might have sneered at that, but then this is a man who liked to polish his helmet with his enemies’ faces.

Iconic moment: The amazing opening monologue, growled out against a ginormous Stars and Stripes: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country, he won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
What to quote: “God help me I love it so,” Patton sighs amid the blazing wreckage of another battlefield. “I love it more than my life.”

Pub trivia: The tanks used to stand in for German panzers in the film were post-war US M48s - better known as the ‘Patton’. This makes them meta-panzers.

Oscars bait? Hell yes. Seven Oscar wins, including Best Picture, Best Director (Franklin Schaffner), Best Actor (Scott) and Best Screenplay (Francis Ford Coppola/Edmund North).