The only two movies Donald Sutherland called perfect: “I saw both of them on the same day”
No list of influential movies from the 1970s is complete without a few Donald Sutherland films.
The Canadian actor wasn’t a suave leading man the way Warren Beatty and Robert Redford were, but if anything, that just helped cement him as one of the more versatile actors of his generation. He could be funny, menacing, tortured, and arrogant, and you could start watching a film with him in it and not know whether he would turn out to be the hero or the villain.
Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H put him on the map, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now gave him a canvas to show his depth and finesse as an actor, and National Lampoon’s Animal House made him an endlessly GIF-able cultural icon. Who wouldn’t want to smoke weed and pet cats with him? Having come from the world of the British stage and then the underworld of Hammer Horror, he always kept you guessing.
For Sutherland, though, cinema always came back to two films: Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 war drama Paths of Glory and Federico Fellini’s 1954 masterpiece, La Strada. The first stars Kirk Douglas as a colonel in World War I who defends three court-martialled soldiers accused of abandoning a doomed attack. The trial is a sham, and the men are scapegoats, but Douglas’s character refuses to defer to the injustice of his superiors.
The second tells the story of a poor Italian woman whose mother sells her to a travelling circus performer. She is subjected to abuse and cruelty as they travel the country together, and it eventually breaks her. Both films centre on human brutality, making them tough to watch regardless of the artistry evident on screen. Sutherland took this a step further.
“I saw both of them on the same day,” he said. “They effectively changed my life.” For him, these “perfect” movies represented an important distinction. “They’re strong statements about inhumanity as opposed to cruelty,” he said. “Inhumanity is a far worse emotion.” It’s true. In both films, we see that the perpetrators of the brutality are also destroyed by it, to one degree or another. Far from delighting in their cruelty, they crumble from it.
Not surprisingly, watching these films on the same day had a profound effect on the Don’t Look Now star, and although he stressed that it’s damn-near impossible for a movie to change a person’s life, he said that these two did inspire him to make changes in his own life, because even though it’s not clear when he saw these movies and what he decided to change, decades after their release, he still remembered them as a pivot point.
In this context, it must have been especially rewarding for him to beat Robert Redford for the title role in Fellini’s Casanova in 1976. Following the mythical lothario through decades of sexual exploits, it’s an experimental film that features such intensely stylised visual design that it makes Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula look like a black and white B-movie.
Interestingly, Sutherland quickly discovered that Fellini had an unusual way of directing. He only referred to his star as “The Canadian,” gave him no other direction than to keep his mouth closed, and often insisted on directing while perched on Sutherland’s knee. In other words, the actor learned the unfortunate lesson that it’s best to never meet your heroes.
