Donald Sutherland 1935-2024, played "X" in Oliver Stone's film "JFK"

[Denny Zartman]

Actor Donald Sutherland passed away at age 88, known for many film roles, including the key role of "X" in Oliver Stone's 1991 film "JFK."

[Gerry Down]

RIP

I hadn't realised until a while back that he was so old. Alot of the actors in the JFK movie are getting quite old now or have passed on.

Another sign the JFKA is passing into history.

[Kirk Gallaway]

Yeah, good actor. Managed to stay working!

Of course, he was never a dashing leading man. In the 60's, he started out playing nerdy roles and eventually made  it mainstream with "Mash." Then he was with Jane Fonda in "KluteI"  I thought maybe they had a romance because he said Jane "taught him a lot of things", or something of that nature I recall reading in a Playboy interview back in the 70's. 

I always liked him in the remake of the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". and I think he was underrated in his performance in  "Ordinary people."

[Matthew Koch]

54 minutes ago, Gerry Down said:

RIP

I hadn't realised until a while back that he was so old. Alot of the actors in the JFK movie are getting quite old now or have passed on.

Another sign the JFKA is passing into history.

RIP

We are about as far away from JFK the movie, as the movie was from the assassination.

On the 50th' Anniversary, I was in Dallas and watched 'Oliver Stone's JFK' in the Texas theater and Robert Groden who is in the movie twice did a brief introduction and talked about the second Oswald from the balcony being taken out the back. Mr.X is a composite charter between Fletcher Prouty and Richard Case Nagell and is what ties the movie together with the why question, and wouldn't be as powerful without that scene. It was Herald Weisberg who leaked the first script to Tom Wicker. I now think had that media controversy not happened the movie would not have been as good a film as it is..  

 

Edited June 20 by Matthew Koch

[Charles Blackmon]

1 hour ago, Denny Zartman said:

Actor Donald Sutherland passed away at age 88, known for many film roles, including the key role of "X" in Oliver Stone's 1991 film "JFK."

Sutherland's first major role was in the film M*A*S*H. I was in jr. high when M*A*S*H was in the theaters and had to be content with the MAD magazine satire as the film had an R rating. 

[James DiEugenio]

Sutherland was the original producer on Executive Action.  He shepherded it through its first script.

But then a job offer came in, and he was replaced by Burt Lancaster.  Who ended up making a lot of money off the film since he was a profit participant.

Brando turned down the role of Mr. X, but Sutherland accepted and was excellent.  I have always said that, for example, Jeremy Irons was a better Von Bulow than Von Bulow. 

Well, Sutherland was a better Prouty than Prouty.  He just had the part nailed: confident, intensely full of data, rapid fire.

Someone who was on the set told me that although Sutherland needed no direction, Costner did.  Well Sutherland walked out of earshot and said, "If he knew what I was saying maybe it would help."

Finally, he did half the narration for JFK Revisited.  I liked what he did, it was kind of in keeping with his Mr X part, doing the Kennedy sections.

They gave him an honorary Oscar I think about three years ago.

[Ben Green]

His monologue in JFK is an absolute masterclass.

It was that film and arguably that scene which sparked my obsession with the assassination.

Just seen a tribute segment about Sutherland on the BBC News in which they describe Oliver Stone's JFK as a 'paranoid conspiracy thriller'!!

 

[Robert Reeves]

I thought I heard Oliver say on JFK Director's cut the Sutherland monologue was shot in one take? that mystical moment in the film is what got me interested in the assassination. I sought out any fact from the words spoken.

Donald Sutherland and Kate Bush in her video for the song Cloudbusting. It got me interested in Wilhelm Reich.

 

Edited June 20 by Robert Reeves

[Joe Bauer]

 A charmingly mischievous fun raconteur he was.

Must have been a super fun person to engage with. 

Loved him in Animal House.

 

 

Edited Friday at 12:31 PM by Joe Bauer

[Mart Hall]

He was an excellent actor. The Prouty part in JFK was so intriguing and I must have watched those scenes 10x before I had fully absorbed everything he had said. 

 

A life well lived indeed, RIP. 

 

[Joe Bauer]

It seems that his years of smoking pot didn't negatively affect him living a relatively long and healthy life. 

Versus say regular cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs?

Edited Friday at 04:05 AM by Joe Bauer

[James DiEugenio]

Why doesn't someone post the whole Mr. X scene from the Lincoln Memorial to them shaking hands and parting.?

That scene is so exceptional because, for the first time, millions upon millions of people were finally exposed to the crimes of the CIA in the name of saving the world for democracy.  The two editors on that film deserved their Oscar as did Bob Richardson the DP.

Edited June 20 by James DiEugenio

[Matt Cloud]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

Why doesn't someone post the whole Mr. X scene from the Lincoln Memorial to them shaking hands and parting.?

That scene is so exceptional because, for the first time, millions upon millions of people were finally exposed to the crimes of the CIA in the name of saving the world for democracy.  The two editors on that film deserved their Oscar as did Bob Richardson the DP.

"Jim, Use the code! Fiat Justicia Ruat Coelum."

 

https://www.jfk-online.com/moynihan.html

The Paranoid Style
Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Originally published in The Washington Post, December 29, 1991

https://www.jfk-online.com/moynihan.html

And so to JFK. It could be viewed as a parody. The homosexual orgies in the New Orleans town house of the villain Clay Shaw are straight out of Maria Monk's nunnery in Montreal. The generals boozing it up as they plan the murder of their commander-in-chief are straight out of Ramparts in a slow week in the '60s. The black waiter who hears nothing is, well, MGM in the '30s. A John Birch look-alike is the fake erudition. Garrison is forever going on about those who practice to deceive, about riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas. Of particular note: "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall." At one point I but yelled out: "Jim! Use the code! Fiat Justicia Ruat Coelum."

But it is not parody, and it is not funny. It could spoil a generation of American politics just when sanity is returning.

All of us in politics ought to see it: This is what citizens under 30 or 40 are going to be thinking soon. But don't despair. We have got through worse. As a matter of fact, an inadvertent illustration is there in the movie itself.

In one of the longer scenes, Jim Garrison meets with a renegade Pentagon officer who explains the whole plot. They sit on a park bench, with the Washington Monument at some distance in the background. Now if you just closely at the monument, you will see that about a quarter of the way up, the color of the stone changes, gets lighter. That is because in the 1850s the pope donated a block of marble to the private association that was building the memorial. It was widely believed that there was a secret purpose in this act -- that when the block was actually set in place, it would be the signal for the Masonic-Papist seizure of the White House. A band of alert citizens saw to it that the marble ended up in the Potomac instead. Work stopped, only to be resumed by the Corps Engineers 30 years later, in time for the 1888 centennial, and that is the reason for the difference in color.

Don't despair, but maybe do read a little. The members of the Warren Commission could have done that for us. They could have known our past better.

Hofstadter closes with this pearl from the British historian L. B. Namier: "the crowning attainment of historical study" is to achieve "an intuitive sense of how things do not happen."

[James DiEugenio]

Well, here is part of it.  Notice the first comment, Sutherland said this was the favorite role of his career.

 

[James DiEugenio]

At the 39 second mark above, that is a young John Newman carrying the NSAMs to Lemnitzer.

Let me add, this issue of the three NSAMS taking away power from the CIA and giving to the military, to eventually become the DIA under McNamara, this is talked about this week on BOR by Len Osanic, Paul Bleau, Larry Hancock and myself.

Its an important issue that does not get enough attention, and Fletcher Prouty deserves credit for bringing it up initially.  One of the things I said on the show is that JFK never really got over the Bay of Pigs.  I think this one of the reasons for the DIA under the control of McNamara.

McNamara was I think the only guy in the decision room who offered to resign. When he did so, Kennedy said words to the effect: Bob, if everyone who advised me to go through with this thing resigned, I wouldn't have a government left.

Edited Friday at 02:10 AM by James DiEugenio