Donald Sutherland passed away on Thursday, June 20, at the age of 88. He remained a working actor to the last, delivering an excellent performance in “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” for Netflix in 2022, which I reviewed (favorably) for the Shelton-Mason County Journal.

Sutherland’s acting career spanned so many decades that, no matter what your age or taste in films, there was a Sutherland performance out there for you.

Fans of war films could enjoy his work in 1967’s “The Dirty Dozen,” and 1970’s “M*A*S*H” (as the original onscreen “Hawkeye” Pierce) and “Kelly’s Heroes.”

Fans of classic comedy can look back on his standout supporting roles as the complacently discontented Professor Jennings in 1978’s “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” and the perfectly cromulent Hollis Hurlbut, who embiggened his debut on “The Simpsons” in 1996.

Sutherland not only shone in slice-of-life dramas such as 1980’s “Ordinary People,” but his President Snow became for young fans of “The Hunger Games” what Alan Rickman’s Severus Snape was for those who grew up on the Harry Potter films.

J.L. Roberson, a fellow cinephile who doubles as a professional artist, named Sutherland as both his favorite actor and his favorite face to draw, with dimensions that would seem unrealistic if any artist had invented them. Roberson contended this gave Sutherland a “pre-caricatured” appearance, with proportions to match the nerve maps of how our faces feel.

Sutherland’s arched eyebrows, wide eyes, long face and prominent teeth could alternate between hilarious, haunted and harrowing with only the slightest shifts in his expressions, so it’s perhaps no surprise that his peak as an unorthodox leading man came during the experimental 1970s, especially in suspense thrillers such as 1971’s “Klute,” with Jane Fonda.

Two Sutherland films that rank among my favorites — which I wish more people still talked about today — were Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now” in 1973 and Philip Kaufman’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in 1978.

“Don’t Look Now” saw Roeg employ an array of film editing and sequential narrative techniques so avant-garde that entire treatises of scholarly analysis have been written about them since, but the intended effect was to keep the viewer as disoriented as our protagonist, played by Sutherland, until the denouement.

“Don’t Look Now” opens with an affectionate married couple — Sutherland and the luminous Julie Christie — being shaken out of their cozy academic reverie by the devastating loss of a child, which hangs over them even as they travel to picturesque Venice, Italy, for his work.

Sutherland, Christie and Roeg complement each other perfectly, in capturing the considerable passion that still exists between the grieving couple, through an authentically naturalistic style, which makes it that much more unnerving when hints of the supernatural creep in at the edges.

Anthony Richmond’s cinematography renders Venice with an encroaching sense of dread and decrepitude, as it exits its tourist season, and like all the best Seventies cinema, the conclusion dangles a thread of hope in front of us, before dooming its protagonist utterly. He and we both realize, too late, that we’ve been misled into fearing all the wrong omens and portents.

The 1956 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” has been remade three times, most recently in 2007 with Nicole Kidman, but the first remake, with Kaufman and Sutherland in 1978, is by far the best, as superior to its decades-prior predecessor as John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and David Cronenberg’s “The Fly.”

Kaufman directs an already talented cast — Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright — at the peak of their powers, and yet, Sutherland still commands our attention in the lead role, as a deliberately unglamorous investigator (a food inspector for the city health department).

While the first “Body Snatchers” film played off the bland conformity and paranoia of the “Red Scare” 1950s, Kaufman’s remake reveals the impersonal narcissism underlying much of the ostensibly Bohemian “self-help” movement of the touchy-feely 1970s. This is underscored by the update taking place in San Francisco, with Nimoy’s overly rehearsed pop psychologist setting off all my alarm bells simply by smiling with a marketably manufactured sincerity.

As much as films that are more spiritually minded warn against the loss of one’s soul, Sutherland’s character wrestles tangibly with a scenario that threatens to rob him of his identity and humanity, and even more than “Don’t Look Now,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” weaponizes his long face and wide eyes to convey his profound degree of loss.

And yes, even if internet memes have spoiled the shock ending of the 1978 “Body Snatchers” for you, it remains an absolute nightmare-inducing killer of a closer, all due to Donald Sutherand’s inimitably haunting face.

And that SCREAM.