RIP Donald Sutherland
Two images came to my mind on hearing of the death of the actor Donald Sutherland yesterday at the age of 88, one real and one fictional. The latter comes from the Bernardo Bertolucci film 1900, an epic saga that traced Italian class history from the beginning of the twentieth century through the end of the Second World War. The social change that occurred was represented in the film by way of its two primary characters, Alfredo Berlinghieri, played in adulthood by Robert De Niro as the wealthy landowner’s son who later becomes the padrone, and Olmo Dalco, a peasant’s son raised as a socialist and portrayed by Gerard Depardieu. Despite their class differences, the two become friends as boys, and the film traces their complicated relationship through the rise and fall of Fascism and changes in the social order after Italy’s defeat in the war.
The movie is regarded as an Italian treasure, particularly in its original 5 hour 17 minute version, but less so in its 3 hour 15 minute American one, that received mixed reviews upon its U.S. release. Sutherland plays a dedicated Fascist, Attila Mellanchini, who becomes Alfredo’s foreman on the estate and cruelly manages its workers. The scene that I cannot forget is when justice is finally rendered to Attila (and by proxy to the Fascists) after the war by pitch-fork wielding women employees who seek to reciprocate his years of cruelty by chasing him and his female companion to their inevitable and justifiable deaths. Sutherland seemed perfect for the role and it was easy to think: “this guy really deserves to die.”
Sutherland played many roles in his memorable and lengthy career, and they span from his breakthrough in The Dirty Dozen, the insubordinate womanizing Army surgeon “Hawkeye” Pierce in Robert Altman’s anti-war classic M*A*S*H (set in Korea but really about Viet Nam), the eponymous police detective in Klute to Jane Fonda’s NYC call girl, as Calvin Jarrett in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People to Mary Tyler Moore’s stoic Beth, his wife who cannot deal with their son’s death, to the sagacious and kindly father to Keira Knightly’s Elizabeth Bennet in the 2005 iteration of Pride and Prejudice.
Sutherland rarely played the classic male romantic lead, but in Don’t Look Now, he and Julie Christie portrayed another married couple coming to terms with the death of a child. A lovemaking scene was so passionate that many believed that they had actually copulated. Sutherland denied it, but Christie did not.
Sutherland was an anti-war activist, opposing both the Viet Nam and Iraq wars, and his public relationship with Fonda after Klute had as much to do with a common attraction to radical politics as with romance. His politics was the main reason he was on the NSA’s watchlist of suspicious persons in the seventies.
Which leads me to the second image that has remained with me concerning Sutherland. In 2005, my wife and I attended our niece’s graduation ceremony at Middlebury College. If you know anything about Vermont, it would not surprise you that they think it is perfectly normal to sit through an outdoor ceremony unprotected against the pouring rain. If that wasn’t miserable enough, we had to endure the address by the primary speaker, Rudolph Giuliani.
In those days, Rudy was still seen by many as “America’s Mayor,” mostly because of his carefully staged performance in the aftermath of 9/11. Rudy had recently “authored” a book on the qualities of being a leader, unsurprisingly titled Leadership. It seemed as though he had jotted a few ideas from the book on the back of an envelope on the way from the airport and mumbled them to the graduates and their families in a perfunctory way. He took his money and left.
It so happened that Sutherland was seated behind Rudy on that stage, having received an honorary Doctors of Arts degree while his youngest son sat among the graduates. This event occurred before Rudy was revealed as a pretender and a fraud who will go down in history as one of Trump’s biggest sycophants and stooges, perhaps going to prison as a pauper because of his ludicrous performance and defamatory statements in pushing the “Big Lie” about supposed election fraud. At least he got paid for his performance at Middlebury, which is more than he can say about the clown show he continues to star in on behalf of Trump.
I can’t help but ponder what Sutherland may have thought that day on the stage but I doubt on that day or any subsequent one that he had little time for the small man who is Giuliani. But it may have occurred to him at the time, despite his long and storied career: “this guy is a better actor than I am.”
