Patton was a better movie. I don’t think that either life or either personality is necessarily that much more fascinating than the other, but more work was clearly put into researching Patton’s life and making it into a better movie.
I love the pick of Mattis.
I find Patton to be a far more interesting figure than MacArthur.
I don’t deny that MacArthur had a talented military mind, but I dislike a lot of things about MacArthur that I have read over the years.
In particular, his treatment of Billy Mitchell, which was shameful. Other things, his pompous attitude, and I still think he should have been excoriated for his failure to prepare US forces in the Philippines in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, where they were able to just destroy our Air Force on the ground at Clark Field with impunity, even though there had been plenty of time to disperse the planes.
I do give him some credit for his governance of Japan after the war. He was the right person for that job.
Francis Ford Coppola did the research and wrote the screenplay for Patton (another screenwriter who came along later gets a credit too). Coppola does the DVD commentary for the film.