Donald Sutherland in 1978.
(AP Photo)
When Sutherland was a radical
Donald Sutherland was an angry young man, says Stephen Armstrong in New Statesman. Early in his career, during the height of anti-Vietnam fever, he purposely picked roles in the anti-war movies Kelly’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen, and M*A*S*H*. He had a three-year affair with Jane Fonda during which he toured the U.S. in their FTA (“F--- the Army”) revue. But he eventually became disenchanted with leftist politics. “There was a potential for social movement,” says Sutherland, now a grandfatherly 72. “There were revolutionary cadres. There was even a cinema of change. And yet change didn’t happen. It was co-opted. In the course of two years, just as Vietnam was coming to an end, it slithered away because there was no leadership. It was all coming from the bottom and there was no one to understand and reflect it. We were in a pretty desperate situation.” Sutherland began to realize how pointless it all was when his wife, Shirley Douglas, was arrested for procuring arms for the Black Panthers. “I was in Yugoslavia when I found out. Clint Eastwood came walking out of the sun like it was a spaghetti Western and said, ‘I have some bad news for you. Your wife’s been arrested. For buying hand grenades. From an undercover agent of the FBI. With a personal check.’ And when he got to the ‘personal check,’ he started laughing so hard he fell to the ground. I had to help him back up.”
