Brass Target (1978)
7/10
Slices of good parts giving food for thought about the great man's demise
10 September 2009
Warning: Spoilers
This film tackles a very serious subject of the sudden and violent post- war (Dec 45) death of General George Patton.

The film builds up to the denouement of showing this death to be an assassination, something I have thought was a distinct probability given the enemies he made during and post the Allied victory over Germany. The story line of the motivations behind the assassination is built up around the theft a huge quantity of the gold that the National-Socialist government had accumulated that went "missing in action" so to speak. The film shows a train hi-jack of the gold , though not sure if that happened, but huge quantities of gold did disappear post-war Germany and was never found.

Whether this was really the route (and the root) of the motivations behind the events which led to his sudden death is debatable but I am very intrigued as to whether or not the death of Patton as shown here was a reasonable accurate re-creation of that death, something which sadly appears not to worry too many of the previous reviewers. The build-up to the set-up so that his vehicle came round a bend and hit a parked lorry seemed to be well done and just how you would expect an "accident" to be pre-arranged.

Kennedy's portrayal of Patton's aggressive Anti-Soviet, anti-communism, with the post-war Red Army command's behaviour having no difficulty coming right down to meet the low expectations Patton had of them seemed well done.

Patton had many enemies in the US. One of the things that he did to infuriate those who wanted to use the Allied victory to unleash a vindictive payback over and against the defeated enemy was to release the Post-War POW's under his jurisdiction, the only set of Post-war POW's to be set free during that time to go back home instead of suffering and dying of starvation and disease in unsheltered open fields surrounded by barbed-wire and shot at by guards as was the fate of others German solders in these post-war death camps.

These Germans were to be made to pay time and again for their collective sin, with a usurious rate of interest, so that punishment and retribution was to be their fate. Patton wasn't interested in such policies once the victory had been won but his internal enemies were.

He was recalled to the US and was due to go home imminently and had already been stripped of his executive powers but Patton's enemies could well have thought that they needed to get their pay-back time in quickly before he did get back to the US and start to interfere with their plans against post-war Germany because of his high-status in the US despite their incessant campaigns to undermine his credibility.

So an uneven film methinks with some good parts and some bad but the slices of good parts giving food for thought about the great man's demise.
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