RIP Donald Sutherland, a Hollywood legend

There are actors you can't help but love. Not many, but the late Donald Sutherland was certainly one of them.

Just seeing that narrow, bony face on screen with the long Stan Laurel chin, the big ears, and the pale blue eyes that could be kind or crazy, hot or cold, humorous or sinister, was to feel better at the cinema. His presence alone helped me get through it The hunger Games. It was a pleasure to see an old pro like him delicately cutting roses in the garden and exuding intellectual, restrained menace in the role of American dictator-president Coriolanus Snow. And it was touching to read that He was hoping the very popular hunger games and its consequences could help spark a youth political movement to confront the dire state of the nation. This was not such a far-fetched idea for a young, politically engaged actor when it was still believed that cinematic movements such as Third Cinema and more traditional cycles of political modernism could play an important role in the revolutionary struggle.

Sutherland was not only a great actor, always interesting even in mediocre bullshit; he was one of us, a left-hander, with a period of intense anti-Vietnam War organizing under his belt. In the early 1970s, at the start of the defining ten years of his fame, he toured with Klute with Jane Fonda in a traveling tour called FTA (Fuck the Army), which put them on the national security radar for years to come. FTA was a secular alternative to Bob Hope's long-running USO show, intended to counter the rah-rah conservative Hope's patriotism and old-fashioned entertainment.

A documentary on the FTA group watch Sutherland reading poignant anti-war book by Dalton Trumbo Johnny has his gun, which was made into a 1971 film starring Sutherland. Sutherland kept the faith after the end of the countercultural struggle of the 1970s. He played the role of Dr. Norman Bethune, a crusading Canadian communist, twice, in Béthune (1977) and Bethune: The birth of a hero (1990), two films celebrating this advocate of 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 wonderful performances in mainstream films, including MASH POTATOES (1970), Klute (1971), Don't look now (1972), Invasion of the body snatchers (1978), and Ordinary people (1980). It is difficult to describe the overall effect of Sutherland's performances, because he was so capable of immersing himself in his roles that he could almost never be seen acting. A kind of hangdog intelligence is at the heart of his star power, which seems an odd term to use in his case, even if it was possible to be a big star in the 1970s with idiosyncratic qualities and difficult to define as the main attraction. He was somehow beautiful to look at, even if he was a collection of physical oddities and contradictions, this impressive baritone emerging from a long, thin, unglamorous body; this almost devilish movement of his eyebrows countered by the sweetest smile.

Becoming an actor in Scottish theater after abandoning his university education to become an engineer, Sutherland first came to prominence in Robert Aldrichs. The dirty dozen (1967), a dozen military convicts recruited to carry out a suicide mission against the Nazis during World War II, bringing his quirky charm to the lanky Vernon Pinkley. Robert Altman saw her performance and considered it a fittingly irreverent audition for the lead role of ironic prankster surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in MASH POTATOES (1970).

Sutherland conveyed a kind of improbable courage and could perform heroic acts in a way that removed the banality of displays of courage and determination. As the hero of Philip Kaufmans' health inspector Invasion of the body snatchershe defines his character's relentless nerve by the underlying pleasure he takes in confronting a French restaurateur trying to pass off rat droppings as capers in a soup by brandishing the unidentified object and barking, If c It's a caper, so Eat it.

There's something inspiring about the way a scene like that can prepare you for its characters' fierce struggle to escape the pod-people invading San Francisco, including scenes of rescuing the woman he likes (Brooke Adams) by breaking into her house and already escaping from her. -he pushed her boyfriend physically carrying her out of the building. Despite his unconventional appearance, you have no doubt that this guy will be the last man standing. And his pod-person takeover at the end, the famous, very memorable moment where he points and yells at a former friend, is still so powerful because Sutherland has made this character into some sort of ultimate, incorruptible individual.

His earlier scenes with Adams show Sutherland's incredible appeal as a romantic protagonist. They are meant to be friends and work colleagues, but the way he leans slightly towards her when they stand together joking, and imbues her smiles with tenderness, expresses his unspoken love for her without sentimentality or cliché.

He's a very affectionate actor, Sutherland, he does affection extremely well. And it's strange to realize how sexy he was, even though the famous erotic scenes of Don't look now And Klute are there to attest to this stealthy power of Sutherlands.

And given all that power, it's surprising to read Sutherland's own account of his essential nervousness as an actor that made him vomit before starting in almost any role, as he attests in a freewheel exchange with Hugh Grant in Interview review:

SUTHERLAND: I'm nervous all the time. For me, cameras are either a voyeur or a lover. If he is your lover, he shares your soul. . . . If he's a voyeur, he's a fucking paparazzi.

GRANT: I ​​know Anthony Hopkins will pet the camera every morning and say hello.

SUTHERLAND: I embrace the goal.

Sutherland then goes on to ask Grant to write down a quote from Alexander Pope that he says describes him perfectly: True spirit is nature dressed to advantage, which has often been thought but never so well expressed.

In a late life Squire review piece, Sutherland contributed a series of statements about what he had learned in his mid-seventies. The latter are set against the backdrop of Sutherland's death at the age of eighty-eight, and again convey those qualities that seemed to be an integral part of him on screen. On the subject of death, he writes with a sort of cold and cerebral insistence on looking at the reality of it:

The spirit of humanity will not help me through my death. My death is a little lonely journey that I will take on my own.

And then he concluded with life-loving warmth:

Do you know Dalton Trumbo? He wroteJohnny has his gun. He was one of the writers blacklisted. I spent time in prison. Lose everything. I got everything back. Wonderful boy. The last thing he said to me was, “Don’t forget to be happy.” »

So Sutherlands set off on his little lonely journey, but it seems he hasn't forgotten to be happy.