The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (405 page)

That said, Sutherland was famous already for other reasons: he is the son of Donald Sutherland and the Canadian actress Shirley Douglas. He is even the grandson of a Canadian cabinet minister—if you want that hint of rejected respectability. And, of course, the father is a good deal of a maverick, solidly Canadian, and never fully prepared to be the “movie star” that once offered. The son is at least as determined a nonconformist. He is the kind of fringe figure who might one day be the center of a great book.

He began early, as a sincere but troubled kid:
Max Dugan Returns
(83, Herbert Ross);
The Bad Boy
(84, Daniel Petrie);
At Close Range
(86, James Foley);
Stand By Me
(86, Rob Reiner);
Crazy Moon
(86, Allan Eastman);
The Lost Boys
(87, Joel Schumacher);
Promised Land
(87, Michael Hoffman);
The Killing Time
(87, Rick King);
Bright Lights, Big City
(88, James Bridges); and then
Young Guns
(88, Christopher Cain)—which found him in New Mexico, circa 1880, as part of a young wild bunch with a lot of attitude. The experience seems to have been formative.

He was still knocking at stardom’s door, but without conviction:
1969
(89, Ernest Thompson);
Renegades
(89, Jack Sholder), where he’s the cop and Lou Diamond Phillips is the Lakota sidekick;
Flashback
(90, Franco Amurri), where he played with Dennis Hopper; overshadowed by Emily Lloyd in
Chicago Joe and the Showgirl
(90, Bernard Rose);
Young Guns II
(90, Geoff Murphy);
Flatliners
(90, Schumacher)—this is the time of his brief engagement to Julia Roberts; doctor at a VA hospital in
Article 99
(92, Howard Deutch);
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
(92, David Lynch); and very striking and intimidating as Marine Lieutenant Jonathan Kendrick in
A Few Good Men
(92, Reiner).

It’s about now that he slips in prestige (but maybe finds himself) in movies that go straight to video, in Canadian productions, in films that are trying to be
Detour
, and in which Sutherland becomes nastier, more of a scumbag, more of a drifter:
The Vanishing
(93, George Sluizer); Athos in
The Three Musketeers
(93, Stephen Herek)—a sort of young swords;
The Cowboy Way
(94, Gregg Champion), which indulged his real taste for rodeo cowboying;
Eye for an Eye
(96, John Schlesinger); the magnificent rapist Bob in
Freeway
(96, Matthew Bright);
A Time to Kill
(96, Schumacher);
The Last Days of Frankie the Fly
(97, Peter Markle);
Dark City
(98, Alex Proyas);
A Soldier’s Sweetheart
(98, Thomas Michael Donnelly);
Break Up
(98, Paul Marcus);
After Alice
(99, Marcus); as William Burroughs (the man who shot his wife) in
Beat
(00, Gary Walkow);
Picking Up the Pieces
(00, Alfonso Arau);
The Right Temptation
(00, Lyndon Chubbock);
Cowboy Up
(01, Xavier Koller);
To End All Wars
(01, David L. Cunningham).

That’s when
24
struck, and by necessity he’s done fewer movies since. It remains to be seen, as
24
flags, whether Sutherland can establish himself as a star or just the thinking woman’s Dennis Hopper:
Desert Saints
(02, Richard Greenberg);
Dead Heat
(02, Mark Malone);
Behind the Red Door
(02, Matia Karrell); the caller in
Phone Booth
(02, Schumacher); as Gauguin in
Paradise Found
(03, Mario Andreacchio)—a role his father played once;
Taking Lives
(04, D. J. Caruso);
River Queen
(05, Vincent Ward);
The Sentinel
(06, Clark Johnson);
Mirrors
(07, Alexandre Aja).

Hilary Swank
, b. Bellingham, Washington, 1974
There are two-time Oscar winners—like Luise Rainer and Glenda Jackson—who faded away very quickly. Hilary Swank shows no such signs, and yet …? As I write, she has half a dozen projects in development and three more that are finished and ready to open in the next few months. She is both star and executive producer on all three, and
Amelia
(09, Mira Nair) was the sort of heroic/ classy project that might bring a third Oscar to go with the ones from
Boys Don’t Cry
(99, Kimberly Peirce) and
Million Dollar Baby
(04, Clint Eastwood). It’s not hard to see Swank looking a lot like the real Amelia Earhart, and gazing into the blue for Howland Island.

Let it be said, immediately, that she is just about perfect in her two very different, very sentimental Oscar winners, and one of those actresses who seems to personify courage. Of course, actors often portray courage—and feel sheepish about it, because it is easier to be brave on film than in life. But Swank’s look—the wide mouth, the jutting jaw, the penetrating eyes—make an emphatic marriage with courage. We feel her ordeal and what victory means to her. Amelia Earhart is a winner and a loser—and one day there may be a great movie about the aviator with the movie-star glamour and Gore Vidal as her cheerleader, but not in 2009.

That said, the fact remains that in nearly everything else she has done along the way, she has been pretty, dull, ordinary, and incapable of lifting the project clear of a sanctimonious mud:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(92, Fran Rubel Kuzui);
The Next Karate Kid
(94, Chris Cain);
Quiet Days in Hollywood
(96, Josef Rusnak);
The Gift
(00, Sam Raimi);
The Affair of the Necklace
(01, Charles Shyer);
Insomnia
(02, Christopher Nolan);
The Core
(03, Jon Amiel);
Iron Jawed Angels
(04, Katja von Garnier) for TV;
Red Dust
(04, Tom Hooper); the dreadful
The Black Dahlia
(06, Brian De Palma);
Freedom Writers
(07, Richard LaGravenese);
The Reaping
(07, Stephen Hopkins);
P.S. I Love You
(07, LaGravenese);
Birds of America
(08, Craig Lucas).

But
Amelia
had no rescue.

Gloria Swanson
(1897–1983), b. Chicago
It would be interesting to see a diary kept by Gloria Swanson while considering whether to play Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s
Sunset Boulevard
(50). Some twenty-five years before, she had been the most successful and highly paid actress of the silent screen. Venturing into independent production, she had foundered on Erich von Stroheim’s extravagance in making
Queen Kelly
(28). After that, she made only seven more films before her retirement in 1934. Her first comeback had been in 1941 with the inept
Father Takes a Wife
(Jack Hiveley). Now she was offered the part of a deluded star of the silent screen, living like a witch in a decayed mansion, attended only by her ex-husband, ex-director butler.

When did Wilder tell her that von Stroheim was to play that part? Undoubtedly,
Sunset Boulevard
is the film by which Swanson will be remembered. Inevitably, audiences tend to link the failure of Norma Desmond—to survive sound, and to retain a sense of reality after the fantasy life of early success—with that of Swanson herself. However much that film exploited and distorted her, she gained one undeserved credit from it. Out of nostalgia or novelty, her performance was highly acclaimed whereas her conception is attitudinizing and vague and the playing itself emphatic and feverish.

Much of that may be due to Wilder’s characteristic betrayal of the characters in his own films, but something too seems to come from Swanson herself. Her staring imperiousness is chronic and unconscious, and when she rebukes an indifferent Hollywood—“I’m still big, it’s the pictures that got small”—it is difficult not to feel that this obscurantism is the exact reflection of Swanson’s thunderous acting style.
Sunset Boulevard
provides a telling study in the way mime had so trained actors and actresses that when sound arrived they could not stop shouting. In truth, Swanson is not the woman to write diaries so much as the preposterous scenarios that Norma Desmond composes for her impossible comeback.

Swanson’s father was a civilian attached to the army so that as a child Gloria followed the troops. She entered movies when only seventeen: a visit to the Essanay studio in Chicago turning into a job. In 1915, small parts in several Wallace Beery films led to marriage to the actor and their joint departure for Hollywood. Swanson joined Mack Sennett and adorned a number of two-reel comedies, but her ambitions were for grand drama and by 1918 she moved on to Triangle where, among others, she made
Her Decision
and
You Can’t Believe Everything
, both directed by Jack Conway.

Her great fame began in 1919, when she signed with Cecil B. De Mille. She made six films for him, hypocritical and calculated offerings of postwar sexual adventure under the guise of moralizing. Invariably, Swanson was the newly married woman persuaded to treat marriage as a sexual obstacle course. Although only in her early twenties, she was made to appear sophisticated and older:
Don’t Change Your Husband
(19);
For Better For Worse
(19);
Male and Female
(19), a version of
The Admirable Crichton; Why Change Your Wife?
(20);
Something to Think About
(20); and
The Affairs of Anatol
(21). This character was the mass-market version of the society female described in Scott Fitzgerald’s early work, and it seems odd that Swanson retained a dutiful, daughterly affection for De Mille—yet another aspect of her own life treated in
Sunset Boulevard
.

Swanson stayed at Paramount as one of their major stars, survived her supposed rival Pola Negri, and eventually persuaded the studio to let her work in New York. Her parts were generally dramatic, affected by her image in the De Mille pictures, concentrating on a rather severe, black-eyed, prune-lipped woman of affairs, incredibly clothed, made up as if for war and brazenly flouting the camera. Ten times she worked for Sam Wood:
The Great Moment
(21);
Under the Lash
(21);
Don’t Tell Everything
(21);
Her Husband’s Trademark
(22);
Beyond the Rocks
(22);
Her Gilded Cage
(22);
The Impossible Mrs. Bellew
(22);
My American Wife
(22);
Prodigal Daughters
(23); and
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife
(23).

Even at this stage, she was attempting to gain fuller control of her films and she insisted on playing
Zaza
(23), directed by Allan Dwan, the third and most interesting director to work with her at length. After
The Humming Bird
(24, Sidney Olcott), she worked with Dwan on more comic material:
A Society Scandal
(24);
Manhandled
(24);
Her Love Story
(24); and
Wages of Virtue
(24). Dwan loved working with her, admired her professionalism, and had no doubts about her ability as a comedienne. She went to France to make
Madame Sans-Gêne
(25, Leonce Perret), and there married her third husband, the Marquis de la Falaise. Back in America she made
The Coast of Folly
(25) and
Stage Struck
(25) with Dwan, followed by
The Untamed Lady
(26, Frank Tuttle) and
Fine Manners
(26, Richard Rossen).

Her contract was up for renewal and, despite offers of $17,500 a week, she chose to form her own production company to release through United Artists. Swanson Producing Corporation starred her in
The Love of Sunya
(27, Albert Parker), and then in 1928 she went into partnership with her lover, Joseph Kennedy, to make
Queen Kelly
. Again, a diary would be priceless. The original script had Swanson as a girl beloved by a prince and traced her progress from orphanage to convent to brothel to palace. Even the remaining footage shows it as Stroheim’s most unbridled conjuring up of baroque sexual imagery. In any event, the extraordinary footage of sadomasochistic harshness may have been beyond Swanson. But she understood the bills, fired the director, and attempted to edit a shorter, marketable film.
Queen Kelly
was never released in America, and Swanson claimed that her debts were only finally paid off after
Sunset Boulevard
.

The same year, Gloria Swanson Productions made
Sadie Thompson
(28, Raoul Walsh) with Walsh playing a soldier and Lionel Barrymore as Atkinson. In 1929, Gloria Productions starred the boss in
The Trespasser
(Edmund Goulding) and
What a Widow!
(Dwan). All three were successful, and yet within a few years she went into grudging retirement. Was it because Hollywood disapproved of her independence, because she was too emphatic in style for the taste of the early 1930s, or because, as Dwan alleged, she “was surrounded by sycophants”? That retirement came after
Indiscreet
(31, Leo McCarey);
Tonight or Never
(31, Mervyn Le Roy);
Perfect Understanding
(33, Cyril Gardner), made in England; and
Music in the Air
(34, Joe May), the last after MGM had signed and neglected her.

Her first comeback did not take, and after
Sunset Boulevard
she made two humiliatingly bad pictures:
Three for Bedroom C
(52, Milton H. Bren) and
Nero’s Weekend
(56, Stefano Vanzina Steno). Her final comeback was as herself in
Airport 1975
(74, Jack Smight). But she was a commanding figure at the end of her life and the author of a very good autobiography.