Sheer Heart Attack: Do Movie Scenes Of Cardiac Arrest Look Different After You’ve Suffered One Yourself?

In August, I had a heart attack. Though middle-aged, the doctors assured me that I’m a bit young for such a thing, but there were nevertheless so many good reasons for mine that one could hardly call my cardiac incident “inexplicable.” In fact, none of the doctors or nurses I dealt with at the hospital — and there were many — ever told me exactly what they believed the cause was. It was as if my choice of lifestyle offered so many viable candidates that even the professionals were able to home in on which one was leading the troops. 

But speaking for myself, I can say that I was NOT expecting to have a heart attack. To start with, I came to the realization that I was experiencing a heart attack in such a mundane way – I got up to use the restroom, and by the time I got there I was out of breath, both of my arms were experiencing what I can only describe as a painful numbness, and it felt like someone (and I suppose that someone was me) was sliding a sharp knife slowly into my chest. Ironically, if I’d only felt the chest pains, excruciating as they were, I probably would have come to a different conclusion; it was the severe, and strange, arm discomfort that made me think “I believe I’m having a heart attack” (I’m cleaning up the language a little bit here). So I called 9-1-1.

When I was approached to write this piece, about films that prominently feature heart attacks as viewed through the lens of having had one of those myself, I of course had to think hard about which movies, good and bad, fit the parameters, and then which of those to include. But given the era in which I grew up, on movie occurred to me immediately, and that is Richard Donner’s 1978 blockbuster Superman, starring Christopher Reeve. Early in that movie, Jeff East plays Clark Kent as a teenager trying to come to terms with his superpowers. At one point, feeling giddy and energetic, he playfully challenges his adopted father Jonathan Kent (Glenn Ford) to a race from Jonathan’s truck to their house. Laughing at first, the elderly man plays along for a little bit, but then stops on the dirt road, rubs his left arm with his right hand, mutters a regretful “Oh no,” and then drops dead of a heart attack. This moment had a profound impact me as a kid. It was not only emotionally devastating; it also taught me, or convinced me (not that this was Donner’s goal) that heart attack symptoms were to be found in one’s arms. Which is exactly where I found one of the two symptoms I was experiencing.

Now, being alive and all, you might think I’d kick back at this scene, shouting that this isn’t what heart attacks are like at all. But what do I know? I’ve only had one. Instead I’m forced to conclude that each heart attack is different, each joining hands with all the heart attacks that came before and after by virtue of them all sucking. And I do find myself relating to many cinematic heart attacks, including, in some ways to what must be the most famous heart attack in film history, the one that felled Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972).

In that one, Don Vito (Marlon Brando) is shown playing in his massive garden with his grandson. Much of this scene is so natural, the little boy too young to give a real performance, and therefore the audience is forced to conclude that he and Brando are really frolicking among the orange plants. Brando, who was only 47 at the time of filming, is, of course, superb; he effortlessly projects the stumbling, hunched movements of a man several decades older. Then you can see the disorientation of the heart attack set in. I experienced some of this, but I also had quick access to a phone to make an emergency phone call. But the audience can just barely see Don Corleone struggle with the understanding that he has no such access, before he collapses, out of focus, in the background.

Activity and physical stress is often a feature of movie heart attacks. Not with mine, though. I was watching Chopped, and before that I watched a long movie (I will now forever associate Everything Everywhere All at Once with the greatest physical pain I have ever experienced, which even without the subsequent heart attack I might have done anyway), and had done nothing more strenuous than walk maybe forty feet round-trip. Meanwhile, in The Exorcist, Father Merrin’s (Max von Sydow) heart problem is set-up by shots of him taking nitroglycerin pills, but by the end of the film the elderly priest’s heart is put through the wringer. For the second time, at least, in his life he finds himself battling an evil demon, and his poor beleaguered heart can’t take it, and Father Karras (Jason Miller) finds him sprawled dead on the floor of the possessed girl’s room.

Perhaps the film world’s most notorious heart attack is connected to a famous comedy, but isn’t actually in the film. Briefly, in A Fish Called Wanda, Michael Palin’s inept, good-hearted, animal-lover assassin slowly wears his elderly target’s heart and its natural, though age-weakened, defense down to a nub by systemically, if accidentally, killing one of her beloved dogs each time he attempts to kill her until, finally, her heart gives way and she collapses dead in the street. So far, so good. However, one day, in real life, an audience member, Ole Bentzen, keeled over in the movie theater while watching the film, and died of his own heart attack. This occurred, the doctors eventually deduced, because the man’s laughter during the hysterical comedy was so intense that the jolt to his body (along, no doubt, with other factors deemed less newsworthy) drove his heart wild, and that was it. Writer-star John Cleese even considered using this incident in an ad campaign, betraying a kind of mercenary tastelessness that Cleese was eventually able to rein in, as the campaign never materialized.

But if I’m looking for the most striking and powerful heart attacks in film, there are two films beyond which I needn’t bother looking. First, in 1979, writer-director Bob Fosse’s film All That Jazz was released. The movie is a kind of autobiographical phantasmagoria, bouncing around in time, and from real, material life and the death-haunted dreams and fantasies of superstar choreographer Joe Gideon (a jaw-dropping Roy Scheider). Apart from all the shots of Gideon working, and dancing, tirelessly, or chugging pills and booze, the most vital part of All That Jazz comes when Gideon actually has his inevitable heart attack. At first, we see him unconscious in the hospital, with a jungle of tubes slithering from his arms, and squat, foreboding medical machines beeping relentlessly. Soon, however, the phantasmagoria returns, and the last several minutes of the film depict Gideon and Ben Vereen as O’Connor Flood performing a version of The Everly Brothers’s “Bye Bye Love” that is both rousing and chilling (eventually the chorus changes to “Bye Bye Life”). This musical number is carried out in front of an audience made up of people from Gideon’s life, and seems almost supervised by Fosse’s version of the Angel of Death (Jessica Lange). As I say, rousing and chilling, the last shot being of Gideon having a body bag zipper drawn mercilessly over his dead gray face.

Seen from my current vantage point, the ending of All That Jazz makes my blood run colder than it ever has before. I want to fight against what Fosse is depicting (Fosse himself died of a heart attack eight years later). But All That Jazz feels like the movie he’d lived his whole life waiting to make, and how must that have felt? Fosse embraces the ending, because he’s certainly not about to change. If you gotta go, might as well go with a song in your heart. What a dark miracle of a film.

For me, though, the peak of Heart Attack Cinema is near the end of the Coen brothers’s The Big Lebowski. Not only does the heart attack death of poor, confused Donny (Steve Buscemi) come out of nowhere, but through some kind of strange alchemy, through his death the Coens are able to successfully transform their silly, hilarious, utterly unserious parody of detective films into, briefly, a meditation on aging and the tenuous forces that separate life from death. Not only that, but when The Dude (Jeff Bridges) and Walter (John Goodman) realize that Donny has collapsed in the bowling alley parking lot, Donny’s physical state now reminds me, quite uncomfortably, of my own. Buscemi’s arms are curled above his chest, his face a mask of pain, as if somebody was, well, slowly stabbing him in the heart. His breath is ragged, he can’t move. He’s frightened. His friends tell him to hang on, they’re calling an ambulance, but Donny simply can’t. His heart can’t. The strength of whatever is causing Donny’s body to rebel like this has quietly been building and growing, and now looms above and within him, unbeatable. Unstoppable. So that’s it for Donny.

Of course, the heart attacks in each of these movies ends with the character dying. This isn’t the foregone conclusion of those who have cardiac episodes in real life — I’m still here, after all — or even in the movies. But when you’re experiencing one, death feels like the only possible ending in sight. It seemed almost unbelievable to me when I came out the other end of this, feeling, in fact, not too bad. If you’re able to keep your head straight, you might realize you don’t need to be Joe Gideon (or Bob Fosse, for that matter). You don’t need to start waving goodbye.

Bill Ryan has also written for The Bulwark, RogerEbert.com, and Oscilloscope Laboratories Musings blog. You can read his deep archive of film and literary criticism at his blog The Kind of Face You Hate, and you can find him on Twitter: @faceyouhate