Donald Sutherland RIP

 Last time I watched Donald Sutherland was a few weeks back when I happened upon the BBC's 1960s Hamlet with Christopher Plummer and Robert Shaw. He was playing Fortinbras- and doing it with an odd Scandanavian accent, adopted, I suppose, to differentiate him from the very English "Danes".  Fortinbras is an unrewarding role but one in which you need an actor with presence. The high-spirited military hero, whom Hamlet so much admires, needs to make an impression- and Sutherland did. 

He was never quite a leading man- he didn't have the looks for it- but he could steal movies from actors who were. You saw his name in a cast list and thought, "If he's in it it can't be all that bad". He was versatile. I've been thinking 18th century thoughts recently and his Casanova has kept popping into my head. It was a selfless performance. Fellini said he cast him because he wanted someone with the "eyes of a masturbator"- and had him shave his forehead to replicate Casanova's actual (to modern eyes) unalluring appearance. Casanova is a disappointing movie- at least I found it disappointing when I saw it in the cinema- but maybe that had to do with my expectations. I find now I very much want to see it again....

Not a leading man, but undoubtedly one of the best screen actors of the last half century. Also, by all accounts, a nice man. Quora has people regularly write in about the pleasant and not so pleasant celebrities they've met- and a former hotel worker recently wrote a piece about how friendly and unassuming Sutherland was- and how he gave everyone in the hotel- including the bloke who merely opened a car door for him- a very big tip....

Fellini Casanova

 So I found a version on line and watched it- Fellini Casanova, I mean.

Even those who dislike the movie (and they are many) praise the sets and the costumes, but the costumes never look anything but theatrical and the sets are habitually dwarfed by the vast studio space into which they have been inserted. Everything looks artificial and tatty and- given the vast budget Fellini was able to deploy- I have no doubt that this was fully intended. All spaces are one space and- in the flat lighting Fellini favours- equally unhomely and alienating. Fellini wasn't interested in fidelity to place and time (as Kubrick was in Barry Lyndon) but is scouring through his own imagination for all the bits of himself he most deplores, putting them in fancy dress, and hoisting them up on screen. It's a chilly film, a nasty film, even a deliberately ugly film- and none of this is exactly criticism. A chilly nasty, deliberately ugly film is exactly what Fellini meant to make- and he succeeded. It's not a flawed masterpiece, but a take-it-or-leave-it masterpiece. Felllini has realised his vision; if you don't like the vision then fair enough....

Donald Sutherland is wonderful, Nino Rota's score is wonderful, the set-pieces are unforgettable (and yes, for all my dislike of the movie when it first came out I have remembered them over a chasm of nearly fifty years.) A common complaint is that it is an empty film,  but it isn't; it is a film about emptiness- which is not at all the same thing. Every so often the music and rioting stop and everything goes still and the wind blows through. Symbols of mortality abound. All that noise we make, all that relentless posturing and swiving are to keep the void at bay. Fellini's Casanova is empty of love, even, perhaps of self-love; he hopes to be remembered as an inventor, a scholar and a writer- as a great Italian novelist;  instead he is remembered as a man who couldn't keep it in his pants.....

By the way, I see there is some puzzlment over the mechanical bird in a case that Casanova carries around with him and sets up in a prominent position whenever he is ready to perform. It's no no very deep mystery. Uccello, meaning bird, has the same double function in Italian as "cock" does in English.....