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PORTSIDE CULTURE

RIP DONALD SUTHERLAND, A HOLLYWOOD LEGEND  
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Eileen Jones
June 21, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Donald Sutherland (1935–2024) projected equal parts warmth,
intelligence, and menace on the big screen. But he wasn’t just a
brilliant actor — he was a man of the Left who never abandoned those
values. _

Actor Donald Sutherland at the premiere of The Hunger Games: Catching
Fire on November 18, 2013, in Los Angeles, California. , (Axelle /
Bauer-Griffin / FilmMagic via Getty Images)

 

There are some actors you can’t help loving. Not many, but the late
Donald Sutherland was definitely one.

Just to see that narrow, bony face onscreen — with the long Stan
Laurel chin and the big ears and the pale blue eyes that could be
kindly or crazy, warm or cold, humorous or sinister — was to feel
better at the movies. His presence alone helped me get through _The
Hunger Games._ It was a pleasure to watch an old pro like him
delicately snipping roses in the garden and exuding restrained,
intellectual menace as the American dictator-president Coriolanus
Snow. And it was touching to read that he hoped
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very popular _Hunger Games_ and its sequels might help spark a
political youth movement to confront the dire state of the nation. It
wasn’t so far-fetched an idea to an actor who’d been young and
politically engaged when there was still a belief that film movements
such as Third Cinema and more mainstream cycles of political modernism
could play an important role in revolutionary struggle.

Sutherland wasn’t just a great actor, always interesting even in
mediocre crap; he was one of ours, a lefty, with a period of intense
anti–Vietnam War organizing to his credit. In the early 1970s, the
start of the defining ten years of his stardom, he toured
with _Klute_ costar Jane Fonda in a traveling roadshow called FTA
(Fuck the Army), which put them on the national security radar for
years to come. FTA was a profane alternative to Bob Hope’s
long-running USO show, meant to counter the _rah-rah_ patriotism of
the conservative Hope and his old-fashioned entertainment.

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Still from The Hunger Games. (Lionsgate)

A documentary about the FTA group shows
[[link removed]] Sutherland reading from
Dalton Trumbo’s harrowing antiwar book _Johnny Got His Gun_, which
was made into a 1971 movie featuring Sutherland. Sutherland kept the
faith after the counterculture struggle of the 1970s faded. He played
the role of crusading Canadian communist Dr Norman Bethune twice,
in _Bethune _(1977) and _Bethune: The Making of a Hero_ (1990),
both films celebrating this advocate for socialized medicine who
served as a combat surgeon on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil
War.

But of course, most of us know Sutherland from his marvelous
performances in mainstream films,
especially _M*A*S*H_ (1970), _Klute _(1971), _Don’t Look
Now_ (1972), _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ (1978),
and _Ordinary People_ (1980). It’s hard to describe the effect of
Sutherland’s performances overall, as he was so able to sink into
his roles you could hardly ever catch him “acting.” A kind of
hangdog intelligence is central to his star power — which seems an
odd term to use in his case, though it was possible to be a big star
in the 1970s with idiosyncratic, hard-to-define qualities as your main
appeal. He was somehow beautiful to look at though he was a collection
of physical oddities and contradictions — that impressive baritone
emerging from a long, thin, unglamorous frame; that almost devilish
swoop of his eyebrows countered by the sweetest smile.

Becoming an actor in Scottish theater after giving up his university
training to be an engineer, Sutherland first came to widespread
prominence in Robert Aldrich’s _The Dirty Dozen_ (1967), about
twelve military convicts recruited to pull off a suicide mission
against the Nazis in WWII, bringing his offbeat charm to the lanky
goofball Vernon Pinkley. Robert Altman saw his performance and
regarded it as an aptly irreverent audition for the lead role of wry
prankster surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in _M*A*S*H_ (1970).

Sutherland conveyed a kind of unlikely grit and could pull off heroics
in a way that took all the triteness out of demonstrations of courage
and determination. As the health inspector hero of Philip
Kaufman’s _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_, he defines his
character’s implacable nerve by the underlying delight he takes in
confronting a French restaurateur trying to pass off rat turds as
capers in a soup by holding up the unidentified object and barking,
“If it’s a caper, then _eat it_.”

There’s something inspired about the way a scene like that can set
you up for his character’s dogged struggle to escape the pod-people
overrunning San Francisco, including scenes of rescuing the woman he
loves (Brooke Adams) by breaking into her home and eluding her
already-podded boyfriend by carrying her bodily out of the building.
Despite his unconventional looks, you don’t doubt this guy would be
the last man standing. And his pod-person takeover at the end, the
famous much-memed moment when he points and screeches at a former
friend is still so powerful because Sutherland made this character a
kind of ultimate, incorruptible individual.

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Still from Don’t Look Now. (Paramount Pictures)

His earlier scenes with Adams show Sutherland’s amazing
attractiveness as a romantic lead. They’re supposed to be friends
and work colleagues, but the way he leans just slightly in toward her
when they stand together joking around, and infuses his grins with
tenderness, conveys his unspoken love for her without sentimentality
or cliché.

He’s a very loving actor, Sutherland — he does affection extremely
well. And it’s strange to realize how sexy he was, though the
famously erotic scenes in _Don’t Look Now_ and _Klute _are there
to attest to this stealthy power of Sutherland’s.

And given all this power, it’s surprising to read Sutherland’s own
account of his essential nervousness as an actor that’s made him
throw up before starting in almost any role, as he attests in
a freewheeling exchange
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Hugh Grant in _Interview_ magazine:

SUTHERLAND: I’m nervous all the time. For me, the camera’s either
a voyeur or a lover. If it’s your lover, it shares your soul. . . .
If it’s a voyeur, it’s a fucking paparazzi.

GRANT: I know that Anthony Hopkins goes and strokes the camera every
morning and says “Good morning” to it.

SUTHERLAND: I kiss the lens.

Sutherland then goes on to make Grant write down an Alexander Pope
quote he feels describes him perfectly: “True wit is nature to
advantage dressed, what oft was thought but ne’er so well
expressed.”

In a late-life _Esquire_ magazine piece
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Sutherland contributed a series of statements about what he’d
learned by his mid-seventies. The last ones are moving in the context
of Sutherland’s death at age eighty-eight, and convey again those
qualities that seemed inherently part of him onscreen. On the subject
of death, he wrote with a kind of cool, cerebral insistence on looking
at the reality of it:

The spirit of mankind is not going to help me through my death. My
death is a lonely little journey that I’ll take myself.

And then he concluded with life-loving warmth:

You know Dalton Trumbo? He wrote _Johnny Got His Gun._ He was one
of the blacklisted writers. Spent time in prison. Lost everything. Got
everything back. Wonderful fellow. The last thing he said to me was
“Don’t forget to be happy.”

So Sutherland’s gone on his lonely little journey, but it seems like
he didn’t forget to be happy.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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