MOVIES - April 15, 1987

China is co-producing a film on the life of a heavy-drinking, womanizing, Communist Canadian doctor eulogized in a poem by Mao Tse-tung. A studio run by the People’s Liberation Army is collaborating with Canadian and French film makers to show the life of Norman Bethune, who died in 1939 while working as a doctor with Chinese Communist forces. “Bethune: The Making of a Hero” has French and Canadian backing of more than $7 million and will star Donald Sutherland. “I expect he will be portrayed somewhere between the glass and the bed,” Sutherland said. “He was a wonderful man, a genius at a lot of things, and it will all be in (the movie).”