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In December 1943, Time magazine reported several contentious incidents that would figure large in the legend of combative U.S. general George S. Patton, Jr.: These episodes were all memorably dramatized in 20th Century-Fox's Academy Award-winning 1970 film, Patton (although the two slapping incidents were conflated into a single case, and a cook rather than a group of anti-aircraft men received a dressing-down on screen for not wearing his leggings). Ironically, the general's encounter with a mule cart was the episode that became the most controversial scene of the film, as described in Robert Brent Toplin's Unchallenged Violence: As this scene is depicted in the movie, Patton becomes enraged upon discovering that a column of American troops, tanks, and vehicles has been held up and exposed to enemy fire because two mules hitched to an Italian peddler's cart are blocking a narrow bridge. The bellicose general angrily turns on the soldiers who have been trying, ineffectively, to pull the stubborn animals off the bridge, shouting at them: Jackasses? You let a whole column get stalled and strafed on account of a couple of jackasses? What the hell's the matter with you? The subsequent killing of the animals is presented through inference rather than graphically: the audience sees Patton pull out and aim a revolver, hears the sound of a gunshot, views quick cuts to the peddler's anguished reaction and a long shot of the bridge, hears another gunshot, then sees the two mules lying prone on ground (but with no visible wounds or bleeding). This is followed by Patton's barking at the soldiers to Get 'em over the side and clear this bridge, and a long shot showing the animals being dumped over the side of the bridge and plunging into the water below. (Some reports maintain that the first television airings of Patton did not omit the bridge scene entirely, but simply cut out the final shot of the dead mules being tossed over the side.) Animal welfare groups criticized Patton's producers when the film was released, because the movie portrayed the killing of animals on-screen and because of suspicions that animals had been mistreated — injured, possibly even killed — during the making of the film itself. This controversy lives on in the modern rumor that not only were mules killed during the production of Patton, but that they were actually shot during (or just before) the filming of the bridge scene. The American Humane Association (AHA) found investigating the reality of Patton to be difficult because most of the film had been shot in Spain, a country that was far away from the prying eyes (and jurisdiction) of American and British animal welfare organizations, and one in which rough treatment of animals was more common. According to newspaper accounts of time, 20th Century-Fox officials pleaded ignorance or dissembled when questioned about the fates of animals used in the film: The animals look dead or tranquilized in the single close-up view of them included in the film, but it's difficult to make a definitive assessment from such a brief glimpse, with no additional context. As noted above, no blood or wounds are visible in the scene, but a carefully-dispatched animal could possibly be dressed and positioned in a way that obscured a fatal gunshot wound: However, Toplin noted in a later book, History by Hollywood, that: With not much more to go by than some sketchy, decades-old newspaper accounts, our best guess would be that a couple of mules (or donkeys) were killed during the production of Patton, but off-camera and by poisoning rather than shooting.
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