First off it's - PATTON (1970)

Patton is based on the true story of General George S. Patton and is one of the most unusual war movies we’ve ever seen. The General is a hard-arsed, renaissance-hearted poet who believes in reincarnation and sounds like one of the most brilliant military strategists of the 20th Century. He lived by the adage, “Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it”.

What we love about going through these movies is the snapshot of the time it provides and that it introduces us to people we’ve heard of but would never otherwise get such an intimate insight into. After watching the movie, we wanted to learn more about Patton the man and how accurate the film may have been. From what we were able to discover it’s a surprisingly accurate portrayal of a surprisingly complex hero. We thought it probably came at a very important time for America – they needed a war hero, an atypical war hero to see them through the fiasco that Vietnam was becoming and they looked to the past to find him. He would have loved that!

I love a story where the protagonist is his own worst enemy - it's probably the psychologist in me - but I really believe no one can do as much damage to us as we do to ourselves and Patton was the strutting, living proof of that.

As a general rule, we're not going to get into any spoilers on these films, so we'll just sum up our findings and scores.

We loved it. It was really entertaining, interesting and thought-provoking. And really different for an American war movie. We were quite worried when it opens on George C. Scott giving a 'rousing' speech in front of a 20-foot high American flag, but we were pleasantly surprised at how even-handed the filmmakers were, even the Nazis were portrayed with some sympathy rather than being fascist caricatures of soldiers.

Overall Mat scored it 90/100 and I gave it 82/100 (for the record, this is going to be a continued trend, I’m much harsher than Mat!)

Given the incredibly grand scale of this film (the producers hired most of the Spanish Army as extras) and some of the most incredible non-CGI fight sequences I think we’d ever seen, we believe it was a good choice over it’s contenders (“Love Story”, “MASH”, “Airport” and “Five Easy Pieces”). The fact that it didn’t shy away from some of the uglier truths about its main character helped it too.

Finally, this is a good time to mention that for the most part, we're not judging the movies as if we're seeing them for the first time in 1970, or 1930 even - we figured it would just be too hard to pretend we hadn't seen 40 or 80 years of other movies in the meantime. What we do take into account is the capability of the time, e.g., we'd never score a movie down for being in black and white before colour photography was widely available. That's an extreme example, but hopefully you get the point. But if a 1980s movie is set in the 20s and all the actors are wearing mullets and faded denim, well that's different - they're going to lose points!