Donald Sutherland, 1935-2024

Elliott Gould, David Arkin, and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (1970).

Even in a roster as quirky as the list of actors who dominated American movies in the late sixties and early seventies, Donald Sutherland – who died at the end of June, just a month shy of his eighty-ninth birthday – was an outlier. Of course, he was different from his cohort in an obvious way: he was Canadian, born in the Maritimes and educated as an engineer at the University of Toronto, though he went on to train as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. And he carried his Canadian identity with him always, through nearly six decades of a career in the U.S. – he never lost his accent or his elocution-class diction, and his acting virtues included distinctly Canadian qualities like modesty, gentleness, understatement and an ironic wit that you might miss if you weren’t listening closely enough. His skill at conveying the interior conflicts of decent men amounted to a sort of genius, and his best roles permitted him to move that skill, which has generally been relegated to supporting performances in Hollywood pictures, into the foreground. His slender six-foot-four frame made him appear paradoxically slight and imposing at the same time, as if he’d slipped off a hanger in a closet, and he had rather a goonish face (which his frequent beard tended to offset). He looked like a small-town Canadian square, but he was as much a hipster as Elliott Gould, who partnered him memorably in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, the film that made them both famous. And, defying movie conventions, he was sexy at the same time, opposite Jane Fonda in Klute, Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now, Brooke Adams in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Misfire: A Haunting in Venice

Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot once again, in A Haunting in Venice.

A Haunting in Venice is the third Hercule Poirot adaptation written by Michael Green and directed by Kenneth Branagh, who stars once again as the impeccably mustachioed Belgian detective. This one claims to be based on a late (1969) Agatha Christie called Hallowe’en Party, but Christie’s plot has been uprooted and replaced with a completely different one; in fact, aside from the name of the murderer and the Halloween fête that opens the story, there’s no overlap. (The book doesn’t take place in Venice and it contains no haunting.) That’s rather weird but no loss, since it’s not one of her better mysteries. The problem is, the film alters it without improving on it. It’s a disappointment after last year’s Poirot, a juicy remake of Death on the Nile.

The Ghosts of October (3): The Hour After Westerly

Author Robert M. Coates.

Each week this month, leading up to Halloween, Devin McKinney is highlighting one of his favorite ghost stories, in fiction or film. See Parts 1 and 2 here and here.

To read, see, or otherwise experience a great ghost story is to feel the slow descent of a benign curse. But we who are addicted to the art of the ghostly know, for we are always being reminded, that most ghost stories fail. They simply don’t scare. Worse, they don’t haunt. They give us plenty of whimsy and cliché. What they don’t give us is the vibration of imaginative contact with the otherworldly. We search for works of poetic imagination which skillfully convey the feel of quiet and disquiet, of distant forms and impalpable presences, and which will leave something inside of us: their ghosts, in a word. And seldom, so seldom, do we find it.

But eventually we may discover that our operative addiction is being fed sub rosa by works which, though they have little or no supernatural element, are nonetheless haunted. It’s inspiriting (no pun intended) to find that, if our antennae are so attuned, “ghostly” needn’t be a matter of content. It can also be one of style, approach, apperception; or it may be embedded thematically, in narratives of characters who realize they are becoming, or have become, ghosts of a kind. While some variant on “the fantastic” – the term used by structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov in his 1970 study of that title – might do for taxonomic purposes, I’ve always preferred to call this undeclared subgenre simply “the ghost story without ghosts.”

The Eco-Gothic: Hilary Scharper's Perdita

“I do feel sometimes as if I lived next to some great, slumbering beast that lulls me into thinking of it as just rocks and water. And then, every once in a while, it awakens and I realize that it is alive and powerful and that I am a tiny, helpless creature next to it!”

– Hilary Scharper, Perdita.

It is abundantly clear that Hilary Scharper’s fine debut novel Perdita (Simon & Schuster, 2013) has been inspired by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. These classics are suffused with Gothic inflections: the desolate landscapes which can be powerful and cruel, the suggestion of a supernatural or preternatural presence, buried secrets in ancestral homes, unrequited love, and what may be most relevant for the novel under review, the sense of a soul trapped in a human body. In addition to these elements, Perdita is populated with malevolent villains and attractive characters with demons that haunt them. The novel also represents an emerging literary form, something Scharper terms the “eco-gothic,” in which nature does not serve as a backdrop, but as a central character in the novel. (Scharper also teaches cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto and has written a well-received collection of short stories, Dream Dresses (2009), about the aspirations of women and the clothes they wear.) Even though she combines elements of the historical novel and magic realism, Perdita’s setting in the tempestuous wilderness of the northern Bruce Peninsula, an area she knows intimately since she has spent many summers there, underpins her decision to allocate human-nature relations a central role in her multi-layered narrative. 

J.M. Barrie's Curse

“May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.”

– J. M. Barrie

Whatever celestial space James Barrie (1860-1937) currently occupies, the sprite likely would look kindly on Marc Forster’s 2004 film Finding Neverland, a gauzy semi-biopic of himself that is based on the play The Man Who Was Peter Pan by Allan Knee. After all, it is a celebratory idyll of innocent play that began in Kensington Park in 1898 when Barrie first captivated the sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies with his gift for adventurous story telling. As a short, hyperactive man with a thick mustache, sad eyes and a pipe-smoker’s cough, Barrie certainly would have been pleased with the handsome, clean-shaven and boyish Johnny Depp who portrays him as a charming defender of the (four not five) boys and a gallant protector of their mother. Time is telescoped in the film.  Set circa 1904 when his imaginative games with the boys inspired him to stage his most famous production, Peter Pan, Barrie would have endorsed the film’s sweet, sentimental tone as it skims across a bright Edwardian surface while ignoring the darker undercurrents and psychological perplexities that pervaded his relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family.

Ghosts in Standalone Novels by Jo Nesbo and Peter Robinson

A scene from Headhunters (2011), based on Jo Nesbo's novel

Authors of a substantial corpus of popular police procedurals or featuring a homicide detective must relish the opportunity to leave the dictates of the genre and experiment with freestanding fiction. The internationally best-selling Norwegian crime writer, Jo Nesbo, who has churned out nine Harry Hole (pronounced Hurler) thrillers, has drawn upon some of his familiar trademarks – gruesome scenes, black humour, fast pacing and intricate plotting – to produce a pared down caper story Headhunters (2008, translated into English 2011, Vintage Canada). The British Canadian writer, Peter Robinson, best known for his successful nineteen novels about Chief Inspector Alan Banks of the Yorkshire police force, has recently released his third standalone, Before the Poison (McClelland & Stewart, 2011), a worthy winner of the 2013 Pilys Award for best mystery. Despite the vast differences in structure, style and narrative, what is similar about these novels is the function that ghosts play in propelling the narrative.

When Things Go Bump in the Night: The Novels of Andrew Pyper

Novelist Andrew Pyper

Lost Girls (1999), Andrew Pyper’s terrific debut novel, an updating of the nineteenth century Gothic, in the guise of a courtroom drama, contains elements reminiscent of a Henry James ghost story and to Bram Stoker’s infamous denizen from Transylvania. A Toronto law firm has dispatched Bartholomew Christian Crane, a lawyer willing to go to any length to win a case, to cottage country to defend Thomas Tripp, a former school teacher who has been charged with the murder of two young girls who have gone missing; their bodies have never been found. Crane learns that his spaced-out client attributes the girls’ disappearance to the legendary ghost of a woman who drowned fifty years ago. Crane, a loner with a cocaine problem, becomes increasingly obsessed with the legend that awakens a long-repressed personal tragedy and the aftermath he experienced twenty years before. The setting, both at the lake and in the town populated by eccentrics and the bizarre, forces him to confront that tragedy leaving the case increasingly secondary. Pyper is very good at weaving the Gothic tropes of doubling – Crane becomes a mirror image of Tripp – and the uncanny – the Goth girls who shadow Crane in his addled mind become interchangeable with the lost girls who drowned. At one point as Crane disintegrates, in part fuelled by his drug intake, he muses that he is surprised he “can see [himself] in mirrors at all anymore, the way [he has] come to live like a vampire; [doesn’t] eat regular food, awake most of the night, fingernails the yellowed sharpness of talons, a feeling a little monstrous too, in the baffled way of the walking dead.” In the end, whether Tripp is guilty seems irrelevant because it is the Gothic elements that most engage the reader.

The Trouble with Hitch: Dueling Screen Sagas – Hitchcock & The Girl

Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins in Hitchcock

Was the Master of Suspense a confused cinematic guru who finally learned to appreciate his long-suffering wife or a sadistic predator forever tormenting the blonde actresses he couldn’t seduce? Two recent films, with acting talent that cannot overcome bloated plots, offer conflicting points of view. Hitchcock, a theatrical release by Sacha Gervasi, purportedly chronicles the creation of Psycho in late 1959. Broadcast on HBO, Julian Jarrold’s The Girl zeroes in on what supposedly took place in the spring of 1962 while shooting The Birds, adapted from a Daphne du Maurier short story. Alfred Hitchcock is portrayed by Anthony Hopkins as a mischievous Peeping Tom in the former new production and by Toby Jones as a repulsive creep in the latter. Their so-so impersonations are undermined by the lack of much physical resemblance to a very distinctive-looking historical figure. Alma Reville, the screenwriter and editor to whom he was married for more than half a century, is alternately a spunky helpmate (Helen Mirren) or a sad-sack enabler (Imelda Staunton). The blondes – an ultimately appreciative Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) screaming in the shower for Psycho and a thoroughly terrorized Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) battling feathered attackers in The Birds – present vastly different accounts about experiencing “the dark side of genius,” to borrow the title of Donald Spoto’s 1983 biography of the director.