Before there was Killing Patton there was... Brass Target

Professional bloviator Bill O'Reilly isn't being treated very kindly by the critics and academics passing judgment on his latest book, Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General, a speculative historical mashup based on the dubious theory that the legendary military leader was terminated by Soviet assassins. But wait, there's more: Richard Cohen of The Washington Post and  Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC have taken their own jabs at O'Reilly's presumptive best-seller, insisting the author should have should have included info about Patton's alleged anti-Semitism.

But here's what I want to know: Why aren't more pundits noting the similarity between O'Reilly's paranoid scenario and the plot of Brass Target, a deservedly obscure 1978 thriller that also claimed Patton's death was anything but accidental? Could it be that few people actually remember this cheesy movie? Or, more likely, that anyone who actually saw it back in the day has tried very hard ever since to forget it?

As I wrote in 1977:

This lethargic copy of Day of the Jackal spins a fantastic yarn about a plot by corrupt US Army officers to kill Gen. George S. Patton shortly after World War II. The plotters are worried that Patton, played with unconvincing swagger by George Kennedy, will uncover their duplicity in a $250-million gold theft that left over two dozen American soldiers dead. The poor soldiers were knocked out by gas, a fate akin to that which may befall anyone trying to stay awake during this plodding claptrap. 

Brass Target is slick, to be sure, but it’s also so lifelessly directed by John Hough (Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry), and so unimaginatively scripted by Alvin Boretz, that it lacks even the giddy excitement of an outrageously bad movie... This is the sort of routinely acted TV-movie-style tripe in which two villains are depicted as gay merely to provide them with some kind of distinguishing characteristics. A woman (Sophia Loren) appears in a few scenes only to provide a feminine name in the credits. And the assassin (Max Von Sydow, more or less reprising his Three Days of the Condor character) makes a lot of smug comments to the hero (John Cassavetes) about how silly morality is. Patrick McGoohan hams it up briefly as a colorful cynic, but his character winds up dead all too soon. 

At the end, Cassavetes pieces together the assassination plot, finds the murder weapon – a gun used to break Patton’s back with a rubber bullet – and polishes off the bad guys. Then the movie just ends. The closing credits reveal that Patton’s death was officially listed as the result of a car accident, and the $250 million in gold was never recovered. My guess is, Cassavetes decided to keep the gold and Sophia Loren, and never mind about who killed Patton. That sounds cynical, I admit, but it makes about as much sense as anything else in Brass Target.

Looking back, I think it's fair to say Brass Target can be at least partially justified as one of the easy-paycheck projects that allowed John Cassavetes the wherewithal to make his own indie movies. I'll leave it to others to come up with a similar justification for Killing Patton.