HOLLYWOOD NORTH ROYALTY

THE SHINING STAGE AND SCREEN ARTIST FROM CANADA, KNOWN AROUND THE WORLD FOR GIFTED ACTING PERFORMANCES, HAS PASSED AWAY.

WE’LL SEE YOU AGAIN, DONALD SUTHERLAND.

ALL KNOWNG ACTOR AGENT PROVIDES OMNISCIENT NARRATION

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The person on the inside has absolute knowledge, but that knowledge has no value except through the agency of another person.

In film, the agency is one layer of textuality further removed from reality as the actor is an agent of the character, after having been transferred, through the script, the absolute knowledge of that film personality.

Donald Sutherland had been that agent actor in war, in espionage, in crime, in sports and in medicine.

Director Robert Altman cast Sutherland as the medical doctor sent to a field hospital during the Korean War who knew all too well about surgery, but he also knew about personalities and the debilitating effect on humanity of prolonged military conflict in M*A*S*H (1970).

Sutherland starred as Hawkeye Pierce, with Tom Skerritt costarring as Duke Forest and Elliot Gould as Trapper John McIntyre.

All three actors would go on to have successful film careers with Skerritt appearing in the franchise launch Alien (1979), Top Gun (1986) and then A River Runs Through It (1992). Gould has acted in A Bridge Too Far (1977), Bugsy (1991) and the franchise series that launched with Ocean’s Eleven (2001).

In that same year, Sutherland played tank commander, Oddball, in Kelly’s Heroes (1970). Oddball had the inside story on the US military advance though Europe during World War II. Clint Eastwood stars as Kelly, a US soldier who discovers through the interrogation of a German officer that a fortune in gold is being kept in a bank of a small European town. Kelly knows about the existence of the gold, but Oddball is very aware of what is required for such a  covert operation.

Sutherland then played a private detective who uses a New York prostitute to find a missing person in Klute (1971).

Ten years later Sutherland played the father of a family with a troubled teen athlete in Ordinary People (1980). Calvin Jarrett must manage the family dynamics after one of his son’s has died.

Sutherland showed his typical calming demeanor while the family gradually becomes torn apart by the guilt of the loss. Calvin is very aware of what the problem is, but he cannot do too much about it.

Ordinary People received critical acclaim with six Oscar nominations, winning four Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Writing.

In A Dry White Season (1989) Sutherland played a white suburban land owner in Apartheid South Africa. Ben becomes involved in the black struggle when his gardener’s son goes missing and then the gardener himself is subsequently beaten by secret police at a protest rally.

Ben knows white society, but he learns more and passes on his knowledge as he investigates all possible outcomes.

Sutherland learned how to lead the narrative and also how to provide eccentric supporting characters.

Director Ron Howard cast Sutherland as the imprisoned arsonist who has the knowledge on how to solve a series of arsons targeting city officials in Back Draft (1991). Sutherland plays the pivot key in the love and hate triangle within a family of Chicago firefighters.

Sutherland transforms his otherwise endearing screen persona into this creepy other person only forensic psychiatrists would find the time for.

In JFK (1991), starring Kevin Costner and an ensemble cast, Sutherland plays a deep cover government informant for the New Orleans District Attorney investigating the Kennedy assassination.

Sutherland found his ultimate role with his character in possession of the ‘black op’ information that is needed to put the pieces of the assassination plot together.

Sutherland’s screen character had built up a lot of trust by this point in a busy acting career. And Director Oliver Stone helped Sutherland cash that good will in for him at the box office when casting him as Agent X.

Sutherland had always created that character who the other characters seemed compelled to sit down at the dinner table with.

Stone cast Sutherland in the reversal scenes after taking the audience to the highest point of interest in the script material. X and District Attorney Garrison literally sit down with the audience in the Washington Mall discussing how secret government deep cover operations are successfully carried out well and how they are not.

In A Time To Kill (1996) Sutherland played retired senior lawyer Lucien Wilbanks. Wilbanks claims to have been run out of town by the legal community, but he still has the respect of Jake, the young lawyer to whom he sold his law practice.

Sutherland transitions to the role of the elder supporting character to a new generation of actors emerging during the 1990s, after he himself had experienced a flourishing of talent in the early seventies with M*A*S*H, and then again in the early eighties with Ordinary People.

In Without Limits (1998) Sutherland played Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman. Bowerman coaches America’s finest distance runners while developing the running shoes and training techniques that would revolutionize the sport. Bowerman’s knowledge and experience draws world class athletes to him.

Sutherland again optimizes his screen character’s attributes, playing the tough love father figure in coach Bowerman, and then using the runners as agents to obtain more knowledge. Bowerman ultimately turns that knowledge to help other runners.

Sutherland continued to act, drawing in audiences just with his name on the marque. Sutherland eventually went on to land a recurring role in the franchise films, The Hunger Games (2012), starring Jennifer Lawrence.

Over the years, Sutherland maintained his screen character while every once in a while taking the mask off the character attributes and narrowing them down to an eccentric part of what the main idea could become under certain circumstances.

The character followed either good or bad impulses, more often than not.