GROSS DIVERSION - Donald Sutherland, the twinkle in the eye of the New Hollywood
1935-2024
Another break from the sequence. Donald Sutherland has died, aged 88. He was one of those remarkable, sparkling figures from the second tier of Hollywood stardom. For over fifty years he seemed to be watching the whole mad culture of cinema from off to one side.
When the studio system fell apart at the end of the sixties, it wasn’t a fall-of-the-Roman-Empire kind of thing. It was more of a defeated collapse; the studios and their worn-out execs really just gave up, walked away in the face of, well, everything: nuclear dread, young audiences they didn’t understand any more, the nightly prime-time competition from an unending war in Asia. And decades of attrition from all those nasty little TV shows, of course - Bonanza and Mister Ed and Gilligan’s Island from horizon to horizon, making everything smaller and pettier.
The young artists (and producers and editors and accountants) in the system’s replacement, the New Hollywood, as it came to be known, found that, unaccountably, there was a decent crowd of lively, pissed-off, undeferential talent just sitting around waiting to pick up where the buttoned-down repertory company of the post-war cinema left off. They weren’t boomers - they were kids during WW2 - but they had university educations, substantial chips on their shoulders, artistic pretensions and not enough work.
And really the absolute avatar of this new generation of eccentric, hip, clever, spoilt, sexy, sometimes pretentious young actors was Donald Sutherland, a Canadian (and thus already an outsider) who had a career in the non-new, non-transgressive, sludgy cinema of the previous era (and in the theatre) but who really thrived once things got freaky in the 1970s.
The critical thing to remember about Sutherland is that he never actually reached the top. He stayed (strategically? Or because of his awkwardness and flightiness?) just behind the rest of his cohort - Beatty, Fonda, Nicholson, Dunaway, Hoffman. Like a kind of weird shadow to the proper stars. Did he drive a Ferrari Dino? No idea. Did he eat at Spago? Did he snort cocaine on a Getty yacht? No idea. We don’t know these things about him.
In the movies it’s the second tier that defines the profession, provides the examplar, the typical. Don’t Look Now, MASH, Klute, the films he made with the Europeans. These are movies that define the period better than Chinatown, Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather. In defining this era the historian will use Sutherland as their mean, the straight line right through the ups and downs of the chart, the twinkle in the eye of the New Hollywood.
Here’s a period piece, Guy Flatley met Sutherland for the New York Times while he was publicising MASH.
Donald Sutherland’s obituary from the local paper in his home town, the St John Telegraph-Journal.
This ‘New Hollywood’ is controversial (should I even use a capital ‘N’?). The character of the shift is not agreed upon. There’s a kind of mystical-generational version that’s all about young, impatient artists taking on their parents’ morally bankrupt generation and remaking storytelling for the new world. There’s a less exciting money-and-business version too, of course. What we should clear up, though, is that this was definitely an economic shift - like the almost-overnight switch to sound at the end of the twenties. Martin Scorsese, almost the prototypical New Hollywood director, perceives in the dominance of the franchise model another shift, on a similar scale.
Is Sutherland ever the absolute star of a movie? Is there a film in which he is not a co-star or a highly distracting supporting actor. Don’t think so. In his Biographical Dictionary, David Thomson says: “He seemed more useful in films for his gaunt, disturbing, and disturbed appearance…”