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About FTA (F*** The Army):

Jane Fonda's answer to Bob Hope's military comedy show was pulled from theatrical release after just one week in American theatres! In fact, it's amazing this movie even got released, let alone got made during those turbulent times.

During 1971 and 1972, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland led a quasi-USO tour that played in towns outside of U.S. military bases along the West Coast and throughout the Pacific. Fonda referred to the tour as "political vaudeville" and the show itself was called "FTA" (the acronym standing for F*** the Army). The audiences were primarily the men and women of the U.S. armed services, and during the tour Fonda and her company interviewed the various soldiers, sailors and marines regarding their thoughts on the Indochina slaughterhouse. Naturally, they hated the war and the government.

The most stunning scenes show active duty troops cheering Fonda and Sutherland as they heap scorn on the Vietnam War, the government and the brass, turning the themes of combat refusal, mutiny, and fragging officers into a musical and comedy review, to the complete delight of their audience, who encourage them with clenched fist salutes.

http://www.militaryproject.org/images/418-4.jpg

Born Donald McNichol Sutherland on 17 July 1934 in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, he was, for most of the 60's, living in Britain and turning up in any part requiring a convenient American accent, a common predicament for Canadian actors.

Sutherland made a one-off return to British TV in The Railway Station Man (BBC, 1992), reuniting him with Don't Look Now co-star Julie Christie.

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Donald Sutherland (1934 - )

* actor
* born July 17, 1934, Saint John, New Brunswick
* educated University of Toronto (engineering, drama); LAMDA, London; RADA, London
* gaunt leading man with British repertory stage experience
* played in several 1960s horror films before starring as surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's breakthrough film, M*A*S*H (1970)
* important performances include:
o the reserved detective in Klute (1971), opposite Jane Fonda
o Jesus Christ in Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1971)
o a death-obsessed parent in Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973)
o the father in Robert Redford's Ordinary People (1980)
o a South African schoolteacher and anti-apartheid activist in A Dry White Season (1989)
* divorced from actresses Lois Hardwick and Shirley Douglas
* his son by Douglas, actor Kiefer Sutherland, was named after Warren Kiefer, the screenwriter on his first film, Castle of the Living Dead (1964).

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Sutherland was a major counterculture star in the early 1970s, winning critical raves as snarky Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H (1970) and as a small-town detective bonding with a New York call girl in Klute (1971, with his co-star Jane Fonda winning the best actress Oscar). Megastardom didn't last but Sutherland remained one of Hollywood's busiest actors, appearing in nearly 100 features and TV movies by the year 2000.

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Donald Sutherland

Donald Sutherland (born July 17, 1935) is a Canadian actor. He was born in Saint John, New Brunswick and was raised in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia.

Sutherland got his start at age 14 at CBC Radio in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He studied in Toronto at Victoria College where he was expelled from residence for throwing a sink out the window. He then went to London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), then he started gaining some popularity as an actor in horror films and thrillers.

Sutherland's great success arrived with The Dirty Dozen and Robert Altman's M*A*S*H. With Jane Fonda, Sutherland co-produced F.T.A., a movie containing quite explicit messages against the Vietnam War. In the 1970s he found himself in demand as a leading man in films like Klute and The Eagle Has Landed, and gained some of the best notices of his career for his role in Ordinary People in 1980. He also played Norman Bethune (Canadian physician and humanitarian and a hero in China) in two separate biographical films more than ten years apart.

He was formerly married to Shirley Douglas, an actress and the daughter of Canadian democratic socialist statesman Tommy Douglas. Kiefer Sutherland, their son, is a director and prominent actor himself.