Hawkeye was an asterisk

Sutherland as Fortinbras

Ten days before Canada Day, we learned we'd lost another Canadian institution - Donald Sutherland.

He played a wide variety of roles, many of them in films that aren't exactly my cup of tea, but I remember him for three things - none of which were Shakespeare.

In the wake of Sutherland's death, I was looking for some of his performances when I stumbled across him at something like 28, appearing  briefly, as a gangly, snaggle-toothed Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince who turns up to clean up the carnage in Hamlet.  This was the 1964 televised production (available, thankfully, on YouTube, it's well worth a watch), filmed on location at Elsinore in the autumn of 1963, which starred a very dishy pre-Sound-of-Music Christopher Plummer, and a rather heavily made-up pre-Alfie Michael Caine.  

None of these guys were famous at the time, all three became so, although it took Sutherland considerably longer.

M*A*S*H was, of course, the film that did it for him.

It's one of the three things I do remember Sutherland for, along with his appearance in the music video of "Cloudbusting" with Kate Bush (based on the more sentimental aspects of the life of Wilhelm Reich),  and his performance of the easy-going, bewildered father in Ordinary People.  "Cloudbusting" is easily found on line, but Ordinary People must be on some streaming service I don't get.  My days of simply renting the DVD have disappeared, along with my beloved Pic-a-Flic, which closed about nine months ago.

M*A*S*H, if you can believe it, is available on Disney+, which we do get, in order that the Resident Fan Boy can get his Doctor Who fix.  

I settled down to watch M*A*S*H for the first time in years.

Just a little personal context:  Demeter loved this movie.  She saw it years before I did, of course, and now denies liking it so much, but I remember her raving about it years ago.  When I finally got an opportunity to see it (probably at the university cinema), I was puzzled.

Oh, it's entertaining.  And it was ground-breaking:  the improvisation, the overlapping dialogue, the gore in the operating theatre (which is mild, by today's terms, but shocking for 1970, particularly in a comedy). However, I remember feeling somewhat uncomfortable, and it took me several more years before it hit me - while I was watching it last week.

Hawkeye Pierce is an ***hole. 

Sure, he's a surgeon, and saves lives under appalling conditions, but plenty of surgeons are jerks.  The guy who safely delivered both my daughters by Caesarian was a jerk.  A fellow mum who was a doctor herself, smiled when I described my experiences with him and said "Well, he's an excellent technician." (Which helped, actually.) 

Also, I realise that M*A*S*H is set in the early 1950s, and seen through the lens of the anti-war attitudes of the late 1960s.  (The movie was released in 1970, but filmed a year or two earlier.)  

Even as a young woman, though, I felt uneasy about how the nurses are treated in the film, i.e. as fair game.  Hotlips Houlihan is, admittedly, a pain, but her punishment for being a lippy female and a senior officer is really over-the-top, isn't it?  Her humiliating exposure in the shower is the prelude of her reduction to a simpering hanger-on.  In one of our last glimpses of her, she's standing like an escort, as the men play cards. 

Here's a famous exchange from early on in the film.  The punchline from the late René Auberjonois is funny, but listen to what Pierce is saying to Houlihan.

See, if she were a normal woman (and apparently she's sufficiently pretty) he'd hit on her, and she'd acquiesce, because that's the natural order, right?  (Yes, she's being a highhanded twit; he's still an ***hole.)

Donald Sutherland, according to all reports, was not a jerk.  He was a fine, multi-faceted actor. We are diminished in the loss of him.