A Tribute To Donald Sutherland: The Quintessential Actor Of The ‘70s, American Cinema’s Greatest Decade

During a 2017 interview with 60 Minutes, a then 81-year-old Donald Sutherland relayed an incident from his youth when, as a 16-year-old, he asked his mother if he was “good-looking” — and the pain of her answer, that his “face has character, Donald,” haunted him for his life. He barely manages to tell the story. “It’s not easy to know that you’re an ugly man in a business like mine.”

His classmates in Canada called him “Dumbo” because of his height and his outsized ears, but he turned to acting all the same. I think he did it so he could disappear, or try to.

At the tail end of the 1960s, Donald Sutherland had parlayed dozens of bit parts in television shows and genre films into a breakthrough as mild-mannered private Vernon Pinkley in Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967), a tiny role that Aldrich expanded into a showcase for Sutherland’s willingness to be, well, a little ugly in a key sequence in which he masquerades as a General during muster and breaks up his entire squad. He’s not mean, but he stretches his face, sticks his tongue out, has something essential, playful, coaxed out of him through this performance-within-a-performance.

By the time the 1970s had started, actors like Sutherland found themselves freed from the burden of fitting in with the beautiful boys of the 1960s — the Steve McQueens, Warren Beattys and Paul Newmans. His work during the ’70s felt so natural, and so effortless, that Sutherland — who is perhaps the quintessential actor of the greatest decade of American film — was never nominated for an Oscar, the profession’s most prestigious award. (Thankfully, the Academy recognized this inexplainable oversight and presented him with an honorary award in 2017.) Sutherland’s greatest surprise was that to an America about to embark on a period of harsh introspection with the Vietnam War raging and Watergate simmering, foundering in the wake of a season of assassination of every progressive and Civil Rights leader in the United States, this awkward, gawky kid became our icon of the sensitive everyman: a sex symbol and, more, an imperfect father figure for a fraught and dangerous time.

From his attention-making turn in Aldrich’s star-studded ensemble, he was picked by Robert Altman in 1970 to anchor his pitch black Korean War anti-war comedy M.A.S.H. (1970) as surgeon Hawkeye Pierce (embedded now in our popular consciousness as Alan Alda in the show that ran for eleven years when the war it ostensibly portrayed only raged for three), a brilliant doctor driven to insouciance and, arguably, madness by the institutional disregard for human life that underpins modern warfare. As Hawkeye, Sutherland treats every slight against him, every brutal injustice and religious hypocrisy, with amiable acceptance and a little three-note whistle. It’s an affectation his co-star for three films during the 1970s, Elliot Gould, would adapt in Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) with his verbal shrug at the essential meaninglessness of existence: “it’s okay with me.”

That was the theme of film from the “Paranoid Decade,” that its heroes were no longer square-jawed matinee idols in traditionally masculine professions, but little twerps with weird faces like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, who discovered quickly that the more they knew, the less they understood. Sam Spade became Jake Gittes, and the certainty of justice became the fatalism of entropy. Best to write it all off as “just Chinatown, Jake.” That decade found us lost as a nation: on the wrong side for the first time in our popular understanding of a shooting war, our humiliation televised nightly — the violent injustice of our entrenched patriarchy challenged by minorities and women and so Donald Sutherland became our Ward Cleaver. Early in M.A.S.H. he’s fooling around with a nurse on a pool table during a quiet moment between intense, graphic, surgical sequences, both of them talking about their love for their spouses back home as they undress. “Those are the vows that you make when you’re with somebody,” he says. He is the avatar of a new morality, that nothing much matters when every institution you’ve been taught to trust turns out to be a lie of the powerful. Nothing much matters when mechanized, impersonal death is forever a button push away.

The same year as M.A.S.H., in Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland (1970) Sutherland plays an independent film director who hits it big with his first feature and is suddenly pulled between a personal project and a commercial one. It’s essentially an American 8 ½ (1963), an autobiographical film about a director slipping in and out of fantasy reveries and his relationships with his creative community, his wife (Ellen Burstyn) and young kids. After a small turn as a grinning, jovially-corrupt priest in Alan Arkin’s Little Murders (1971), he devastates in Alan Pakula’s Klute (1971) opposite his then-girlfriend Jane Fonda who plays a prostitute who finds herself suddenly-embroiled in a missing person case, and possibly a murder. As John Klute, best friend to the victim enlisted to solve his disappearance, Sutherland is repressed, tortured by his attraction to a woman who lives a life that is almost entirely alien to him. Look at him in the scene immediately following Bree’s (Fonda) seduction of Klute as she regains power in their relationship. Watch the complexity he expresses without a word: the pain of being played the fool by a woman he loves but can never, not really, love him back. There he is once again, the 16-year-old boy asking his mother if he’s handsome — and her response in the face and voice of the impossibly beautiful woman he’s dating in real life that she “never comes when I’m with a John.” He’s not crushed, he’s… what is it? Validated in his worldview?

In the role in which I know him best, health inspector Matthew Bennell in Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Sutherland suffers from another terrible unrequited crush, this time on his co-worker Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) who is stuck, from his perspective, in a relationship with of all things a dentist. When things are just starting to get bad in the film, to calm her Matthew asks Elizabeth if she can still do “that thing with your eyes? If you’re not crazy, you can still do that thing with your eyes.” Distracted by an improvised line drawn from Sutherland’s and Adams’ friendship with one another, she pauses surprised, does a little trick with her eyes, and they laugh. (Their chemistry is so potent, they were reunited almost immediately in Noel Black’s 1979 caper comedy A Man, A Woman and a Bank.)

I think a lot of a famous line from Godard when talking about film. He said that photography is truth, and cinema is truth 24 times per second. Sutherland was beautiful as the unrequited, the longing. He’s not pathetic in this state because this cross is his to carry. Melancholy is his birthright. Look at him, extraordinary in his grief and derangement in John Schlesinger’s devastating The Day of the Locust (1975) as pent up accountant Homer Simpson driven to madness and finally murder by his infatuation with a failed starlet (Karen Black) who uses him for security without rewarding him with sex. It made his performance in Fellini’s Casanova (1976) what it is, Sutherland’s portrayal of the infamous lothario as a philosopher of the disappointment that immediately follows consummation. The last shot of the film finds an aged Casanova, near death, imagining a dance on a quiet shore with an automaton, insensible and non-judgemental, with whom he found a kind of lasting companionship, even love, at last. It’s not about sex, it’s about acceptance.

The first time I saw Sutherland was when he played the psychiatrist and inventor Wilhelm Reich who, with his son Peter, spent days on their family farm attempting to make rain with a machine in Kate Bush’s video for her song she named after the machine: “Cloudbusting.” Bush describes the joy of Peter’s childhood (she plays Peter in the video), and then the pain of her father’s sudden imprisonment. My first impression of Sutherland, in other words, was not as the Byronic hero, lovelorn, but as the imperfect father: brilliant, affectionate (he fans Peter with his handkerchief playfully when they finish dragging the cloudbusting contraption to the top of a hill), warm — and terribly flawed, a “threat to the men in power,” and eventually unable to protect Peter (nor Peter, him) from the vagaries of an capricious universe. Bush found out where Sutherland was staying while in England and made a personal appeal to him. He agreed to do it and waived his fee. I think he saw himself clearly in this role: that sense of a failed father has always been touching to me.

The Romanticist poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote beautifully about his love for his children and his fears that his own moral and physical weaknesses would result in him inevitably failing them. I named my son Coleridge. I thought about naming him Sutherland. I shared Coleridge’s fear that my own inadequacies would ruin my children. In my mind, I already had.

In that same 60 Minutes interview from 2017 referenced above, Sutherland watches the opening sequence of Nicolas Roeg’s astonishing gialli Don’t Look Now (1973) in which, as architect John Baxter, he fails to save his young daughter from drowning in the pond in their backyard. He says, referring to being asked to revisit his performances, “today is going to be a hard day for me.” He’s crying. John Baxter has never really left him because I think John Baxter is very near to who Sutherland was: brilliant, warm, and tortured at some essential place in himself by self-loathing and doubt. Baxter spends all of Roeg’s film (Sutherland named one of his sons “Roeg”) as a man of reason and logic plagued by supernatural insights and precognition. He rejects his intuition and bullies his wife for falling in with a pair of sisters who claim to be psychic and urge the Baxters to leave Venice, to heed a warning passed along from their dead daughter. Baxter can’t bear to consider that had he only listened to his feelings in the beginning, he might have saved his daughter in the first place. 

He ends the 1970s as Calvin Jarrett, patriarch of a well-to-do upper-middle-class family in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980). As the film opens, Calvin’s eldest son has died in an accident and his surviving son, Conrad (Timothy Hutton) has tried to kill himself. Calvin’s wife, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) has become brittle and hostile, and all of Calvin’s attempts to keep his family together result in fomenting further strife and disconnection. I am consistently broken by the scene where Calvin tries to get a photograph of Beth and Conrad together — something only Calvin wants. After cajoling them around into various poses and fiddling with the camera, Conrad loses his temper and screams at his father. Watch Sutherland’s expression transform from playful and happy in an instant to stunned, deadened, shutdown entirely. He knows the requirements of playing a father and he’s not up to the task, not now if ever.

As wealthy art dealer Flan in Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation (1993), we understand how he could so easily be duped by a young man claiming to be Sidney Poitier’s son precisely because Flan so obviously misses his own children and sees in this con-artist the chance to try again to be the man he hopes he is. When we watch Sutherland — whether he’s playing a spy, or Gauguin, or someone from his collection of priests and military men and mysterious Deep Throats (as in his movie-stealing scene as “X” in Oliver Stone’s JFK) — he is always electric, and always touching and always, always absolutely credible. He is marked by intelligence, by a magnetic empathy, and by a pool of mourning that’s never very far away even when he’s playing broad comedy (Animal House) or mustache-twirling villainy (Backdraft). He is one of one, Sutherland was; an irreplaceable loss whose passing functions as a reminder and a prod to dip into the deep well of a moment in our cinematic history that is arguably unmatched in all of cinematic history. Things would not be as they are with us now without artists like Donald Sutherland. He died June 20, 2024 at the age of 88 and we are poorer now than we were before.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.