Donald Sutherland’s Nothing Personal Is the Biggest Flop of His Career

After gaining Hollywood stardom with his acclaimed performance as combat surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in the 1970 black comedy war film M*A*S*H, Donald Sutherland continued to do his part for his native Canadian film industry, which he virtually carried throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s, as the most prominent Canadian-born actor to achieve Hollywood leading-man status during this period. Sutherland was often loyal to Canadian cinema to a fault. The best of Sutherland’s Canadian films is the 1981 medical drama Threshold, in which the actor gives a compelling performance as a brilliant heart surgeon performing the first artificial heart transplant on a human patient in history.

The worst of his Canadian films, and possibly his entire career, is the 1980 romantic comedy Nothing Personal. In it, Sutherland plays a jaded university law professor who joins forces with an environmental lawyer, played by Suzanne Somers, to prevent the slaughter of baby seals in Alaska. Boring, disorganized, desperate, and unconvincing, Nothing Personal is the kind of film that tries to be about everything to disguise the fact that it isn’t really about anything.

Besides the campaign to save baby seals, the plot involves car chases, Indigenous rights, melodrama, political intrigue, romance, and soap opera. This is a cynical cover for the film’s primary purpose, which is to place the gorgeous Somers in various soft-core sexual situations with Sutherland, who was only a decade older than Somers but looks and seems like a father figure.

For Sutherland, Nothing Personal is a most curious entry from a period in which he gave some of the best performances of his career. Nothing Personal proves that even great actors are entirely dependent on quality material, as evidenced by Sutherland’s Oscar-worthy performance in the 1980 drama film Ordinary People, which was filmed directly after Nothing Personal.

Donald Sutherland and Suzanne Somers Made an Unlikely Pairing

When one thinks of Donald Sutherland’s most memorable screen pairings with actresses, the list includes Brooke Adams in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now, Jane Fonda in Klute, Kate Nelligan in Eye of the Needle, and Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People. Needless to say, his co-star in Nothing Personal, Suzanne Somers, represents the oddest pairing in his career.

While Sutherland brought an illustrious list of film credits to Nothing Personal, Somers, who previously starred alongside Ian McShane in the obscure 1979 British soccer drama film Yesterday’s Hero, was best known to audiences for playing eternally bubbly blonde Chrissy Snow on the hit ABC sitcom Three’s Company, which had ended its third season when the filming of Nothing Personal commenced in June 1979.

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Despite this seeming mismatch, Somers radiates charm and energy in Nothing Personal. In it, Somers plays Abigail Adams, a Harvard-educated environmental lawyer who teams with Sutherland’s character, law professor Roger Keller, to prevent an endangered colony of seals from being murdered to make way for the construction of a United States military base in Alaska. Of course, a romance ensues between the lawyer and the professor.

Within this unlikely combination, Somers is more watchable than Sutherland, who handles romantic scenes with Somers with awkwardness and seems generally embarrassed by the entire proceedings. His evident lack of enthusiasm in Nothing Personal was shared by Somers, who wrote in her autobiography that he essentially took over the direction of Nothing Personal after it became apparent that the film’s credited director, George Bloomfield, wasn’t up to the unenviable task.

Nothing Personal Marked the Beginning and End of Somers’ Film Career

Suzanne Somers holds a degree of cinematic immortality from her poignantly symbolic performance as the elusive blonde who drives a white Thunderbird and haunts a teenage boy’s thoughts in the blockbuster 1973 coming-of-age film American Graffiti. However, Nothing Personal was a terrible vehicle to attempt to launch a film career for Somers, whose feature film ambitions were permanently halted by the film’s commercial and critical failure.

The failure of Nothing Personal heralded a tumultuous period in Somers’ career. In the summer of 1980, just before Three’s Company entered production for its fifth season, Somers, who had been receiving $30,000 per episode, demanded a salary increase to $150,000 along with a share of the show’s profits. The dispute resulted in Somers having her role reduced to that of a cameo figure before being phased out entirely throughout the fifth season, in which her character, Chrissy Snow, was replaced by Chrissy’s cousin, Cindy Snow, played by Jenilee Harrison.

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While Somers, who died in 2023 at the age of 76, was undoubtedly limited as an actress, she wasn’t as limited as Nothing Personal and Three’s Company made her seem. What she needed to transcend her dumb-blonde persona was a role that blended her sex appeal and warmth with the intelligence with which Somers launched an infomercial empire in the 1990s.

Sutherland Was Too Good for Nothing Personal

Within Donald Sutherland’s rich career, Nothing Personal resides in utter obscurity, buried by the enduring legacy of so many of his memorable and popular films. While Nothing Personal is hardly the only terrible film in which Sutherland starred throughout his career, in and out of Canada, the actor never appeared in another movie that so completely ignored and misunderstood his distinctive qualities as an actor.

With the various tributes that accompanied the announcement of Sutherland’s death at the age of 88, there followed a growing realization that he left behind many interesting and memorable films that never received the acclaim and attention they deserved while he was alive, such as Eye of the Needle and Threshold. In stark contrast, none of Sutherland’s films are more worthy of being completely forgotten than Nothing Personal. Nothing Personal is available to stream on MGM+.