Love Him Or Hate Him, Donald Sutherland Was Just Doing His Job
Most “character actors” go by the second name of “That Guy.”
We’re watching a movie, probably on TV, and there’s a scene with an ex-boyfriend or a bartender or a strange coworker. We point to the screen and exclaim, “There’s That Guy!” who was the cop or the doctor or the race car driver in another movie we saw a few months ago.
Donald Sutherland, who died Thursday at the age of 88, was never That Guy. He was Donald Sutherland, who looked and sounded like nobody else.
He once recounted with some amusement how, as a youngster, he asked his mother whether he was good-looking and she replied, after some thought, that his face had “character.”
Like most of us, he took that the same way a girl would take it if her blind date told his friends the next day that she had “a good personality.”
But Mrs. Sutherland had inadvertently given young Donald a more valuable response than “Yes, you are.” He had a face that people remembered, because he could do so much with it.
As with most actors, it took a little while before the film world recognized that. He first appeared on a movie screen, three week before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, in a British film called The World Ten Times Over. If you remember the movie, you might not remember Sutherland, who was uncredited for his role as “tall man in a nightclub.” It’s similar to not remembering Richard Dreyfuss in The Graduate.
Before the movie biz realized what Sutherland could do with his face, besides look tall, he was cast in seemingly random films like Castle of the Living Dead and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. Then, presumably because of his generally distinct look — somewhere between goofy and menacing — he caught the eye of the right powerful guy at the right time.
Sutherland was filming The Dirty Dozen (1967), in which he had a minor but memorable role, when he was noticed by producer Ingo Preminger, who the following year put together the movie adaptation of M*A*S*H and cast Sutherland as the wisecracking, head-shaking Hawkeye Pierce.
Hawkeye was arguably Sutherland’s first lead role, though M*A*S*H was more of an ensemble production. In any case, once M*A*S*H morphed into a TV show with a different tone for its dark comedy, Alan Alda became the permanent face of Hawkeye.
No matter. Sutherland now had both feet inside the tent, and three years later he was costarring with Jane Fonda in Klute. As he was between marriages at the time, he also costarred with Fonda in a torrid affair, suggesting she too appreciated character.
He spent the ’70s ping-ponging from the sex-drenched title character in Fellini’s Casanova to a weed-smoking college professor in Animal House, before in 1980 landing what is often considered his best role, the whipsawed father of a crumbling family in Ordinary People.
When it’s noted that Sutherland was never nominated for an Academy Award, Ordinary People frequently serves as Exhibit A. His character, Calvin Jarrett, ultimately faces a choice between his troubled wife and his troubled son, and Sutherland walked the line perfectly, leaving his excruciating dilemma up in the air for viewers to contemplate themselves.
He rolled out the same skill a year later, in Eye of the Needle, with a character on the opposite end of the moral scale. Instead of Calvin Jarrett, with whom audiences could sympathize, his Eye of the Needle character was Henry Faber, a ruthless World War II Nazi agent who in the spring of 1944 discovers the Allies’s plan for what would become the D-Day invasion.
In these pre-cell phone days, Faber must deliver the message to Adolf Hitler in person, and he is waiting for a German U-Boat to pick him up on the remote Scottish island where he has tucked himself away following his discovery.
While he waits he falls into an affair with a local woman, and naturally enough in a spy adventure tale, the story winds its way to a situation where he may have to kill her to make his rendezvous with the U-Boat. We’ve seen him kill before, with no more thought than he gives to a breakfast scone, and right up to the end we do not know what he will do. Without that suspense, the movie does not succeed, and Sutherland nails it.
Those under 60 may best remember Donald Sutherland for a later role, President Corialanus Snow in the Hunger Games franchise. While that role didn’t require a lot of subtlety, Sutherland refrained from turning Snow into a mustache-twirling cartoon villain. He was a much oilier and therefore more chilling bad guy.
At the same time he could play a warmly endearing Mr. Bennett in the 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice (the Keira Knightley version).
One of the pivotal scenes in Jane Austen’s story has Bennett daughter Elizabeth refusing to marry the insufferable Mr. Collins despite her mother’s blunt command that she must do so to ensure the family’s standing and fortune. This leads to a showdown in which Mrs. Bennett demands that Mr. Bennett affirm her directive.
Sutherland’s face betrays nothing as he pauses. With each second, tension soars. Finally he says, “Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins and I will never see you again if you do.”
Every viewer clenches a fist and says, “Yessssss!”
Many character actors could play that scene and make the line work. There’s just a little extra edge when it’s not played by That Guy.
