“Saw the blue tunnel”: the movie that momentarily killed Donald Sutherland
In his 60 years of diverse roles, Canadian screen actor Donald Sutherland faced a multitude of mortal threats: being overtaken by pod people in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, beaten to a pulp by a righteously enraged crowd in both Day of the Locust and the Hunger Games franchise, or stalked by his small-statured murderer on the foggy streets of Venice in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. But while the characters he played on screen often came to a grisly end, there was one moment in Sutherland’s career where he himself came very close to exiting stage left early.
When asked by The Guardian what his closest dalliance with death was back in 2013, Sutherland told the story of a serious illness he contracted in the former Yugoslavia during the filming of World War Two comedy from 1970 Kelly’s Heroes.
He revealed. “I died in Yugoslavia in 1968 for a few seconds. In a coma: spinal meningitis, bacterial. Saw the blue tunnel. MGM flew me to London and Charing Cross hospital for six weeks, then back to the film Kelly’s Heroes, with my brain a boiled cauliflower.”
The film, which saw Sutherland act as a comedic foil to action heavy-hitters like Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas, told the story of a group of rogue American soldiers who hold up a French bank to steal Nazi gold. With the Balkan state still running an army on World War Two-era equipment, it made sense as the place to film. But equipment in need of a refresh was also the reason for Sutherland’s brush with mortality – according to him, it was a lack of antibiotics that made the condition serious.
He told the Observer in 2015 that a lack of modern medicine in what is now Croatia put him in the uncomfortable position of overhearing the plans for his own funeral. “They didn’t have the antibiotics, and I died. I saw the blue tunnel and, like, crap, if you’re ever with anyone who is in a coma, talk to them. They can hear you. I could hear everything. I heard them making my funeral arrangements.”
Meningitis is an infection of the brain’s membranes and spinal cord, usually requiring hospitalisation for an antibiotic drip when bacterial. It can leave people with long-term issues like hearing loss, deafness, and problems with memory and physical coordination. In Sutherland’s case, he was luckily able to emerge from his coma to find himself in London and go on to have more than 50 more years of roles as a beloved character actor in films like Animal House, JFK and Pride & Prejudice.
The spectre that missed out on Sutherland back in 1968 was finally successful this year, seeing him shuffle off the mortal coil at the age of 88 from lung disease. Whether or not he saw another blue tunnel in those final moments remains to be seen for everyone still on this side – its an image seen in Sutherland lookalike Kurt Vonnegut’s 1985 novel Galapagos, where an earth-bound spirit resists entering the blue tunnel that leads to the next stage of the hereafter.
