The movie begins without showing the 20th Century-Fox logo, or any other indication that the film is starting. At military bases across the US theater owners reported that soldiers in the audience would often stand up and snap to attention when they heard the movie's opening line ("Ten-hut!"), assuming it to be a real call to attention.
The ivory-handled revolvers George C. Scott wears in the opening speech were George S. Patton's real-life revolvers. Those pistols are in the collection of the museum at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.
George C. Scott won the Academy Award for Best Actor and famously refused to accept it, claiming that competition between actors was unfair, disliking the Academy's voting process and called the Academy Awards a big "meat parade".
Soldiers who served under the real George S. Patton said that the general's voice was surprisingly high-pitched. This can be heard in actual films and recordings of him. Patton himself said that he used profanity so liberally in order to compensate for this.
George C. Scott initially refused to film the famous speech in front of the American flag when he learned it would be at the beginning of the film. He felt that the rest of his performance would not live up to that scene. Director Franklin J. Schaffner lied to Scott and told him that the scene would be put at the end of the film.
Karl Malden: [name] After Gen. Omar Bradley loses his helmet when his jeep is blown up by German artillery, he says to his driver, "Give me that helmet, Sekulovich!" This is part of Malden's insistence that there always be a character named Sekulovich in his films, in reference to his own birth name, Mladen Sekulovich.
Claude Akins: The voice of the soldier who calls the room to "attention" at the beginning of the film.