(3010x2000)
Seconds (1966)
A Film by John Frankenheimer
DVD5 | ISO | NTSC 16:9 (720x480) | 01:46:59 | 3,92 Gb
Audio: English (Dolby AC3, 2 ch); French (Dolby AC3, 2 ch) | Subs: English
Genre: Sci-Fi, Thriller, Mystery | Nominated for Oscar | USA
A Film by John Frankenheimer
DVD5 | ISO | NTSC 16:9 (720x480) | 01:46:59 | 3,92 Gb
Audio: English (Dolby AC3, 2 ch); French (Dolby AC3, 2 ch) | Subs: English
Genre: Sci-Fi, Thriller, Mystery | Nominated for Oscar | USA
Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is a listless Manhattan businessman who lives with his wife in the New York suburbs. One day, he runs into an old friend (Murray Hamilton) whom he thought had died. The friend leads him to The Company, a secretive operation run by The Old Man (Will Geer). The Company is a high-tech service which, for a price, provides older men with plastic surgery, a beefed-up body, and a fresh start in life. To cover the "disappearance," a middle-aged male cadaver is "killed" in a hotel fire. Hamilton submits to the operation that will turn him into a "Second," and when the bandages are removed, he's shed twenty years, renamed Tony Wilson and portrayed by Rock Hudson. The Company creates a new identity for Hamilton, relocating him in a hedonistic California beach community with an identity as a painter. Celebrating during a local wine festival, Hamilton has his revelry cut short when he learns that all his new young friends are Seconds like himself and suddenly feels trapped in these surroundings. Unfortunately, finding a way out isn't nearly as easy as it was to find a way in.
IMDB
John Frankenheimer pioneered the paranoid thriller in the '60s with the superlative The Manchurian Candidate, and the flawed Seven Days in May. After his thematic break into WW2 action with The Train, he created this intricate concoction that shrinks his previous conspiracies down to the intimate level.
This is Faust, of course, except our hero sells his soul not to the devil but for the ultimate consumer product, the ability to restart his life again in a new identity. It's a carrot so tempting that Arthur never questions the details, such as what that the room full of bored men waiting by telephones is all about, or where exactly the bogus body comes from, to fake his death. Arthur Hamilton is disenchanted and alienated from himself, drifting in a quiet nightmare of sameness and meaningless daily life, ruminating over his youth and ideals and wondering what went wrong. He compounds his grief, of course, by believing he can somehow start again and leave his previous self behind.
This earlier part of the film is nothing short of brilliant, with John Randolph projecting the petty problems of a modern podperson with perfect pitch. He conveys the lack of an inner light, a spiritual beacon, very clearly. Instead of looking for the answer inside, Hamilton tries to buy his dreams. The secret company that provides the secret services is tricked out without resorting to futuristic technology, but it's mostly their paranoid safeguards which make Seconds so sophisticated. Farfetched to the point of absurdity, the company undertakes its business with stringent secrecy and uses careful blackmail to protect itself, neatly sidestepping the obvious impossibility of keeping such a vast conspiracy secret.
The second half of Seconds ties up the story with a brutal irony, but even though most of the scenes are beautifully realized, something is lost along the way. It has to do with the transformation, of course. In movies, the amount of credibility we accept determines how we take individual leaps of cinematic faith along the way. In silly melodramas or films noir, we frequently accept labyrinthine 'trick' plotting that we'd never buy in real life. In The Scar, our psychiatric-trained master thief just happens to run into a real psychiatrist who looks just like him, an identical double, thus facilitating a change of identity. We accept the silliness of this because we want to, as we're following a genre story as a theme, not as a credible sequence of events.
Saggy, soulful John Randolph becomes trim, hunkish 'mesomorph' Rock Hudson, possibly the man he would want to be, but it never seems right. We don't see any vestige of Randolph in Rock. Even if the company had transplanted John's brain into Rock's body, we'd expect to feel some of the older man shining through. Whether this is Rock's fault or the screenwriter's or Frankenheimer's, is not clear. Rock certainly stares and looks perturbed enough, but the problems he comes up with appear to be unconnected to the guy who roamed the subways like a lost soul. As a moral tale, it's not clear whether Hudson's fate is sealed by his flawed desires, or whether he's the total pawn of this evil corporation (which must experience this kind of 'failure' all the time). The movie excels at creating a first-person paranoid experience.
Extending the ideas in the picture, a case can be made for its being a critique of self-generating corporations that must continue to make a profit and roll forward. Since profit and self-preservation are what drives a company, this one has to victimize the very customers it fails to successfully serve.
A lowly Hammer Horror film, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, and the musical Damn Yankees both had powerful scenes with a brain transplant patient and a damned soul revisiting their wives from 'another existence.' Seconds has more psychological depth than either, but in keeping with the paranoid, cool stance, remains aloof. We've built up a strong desire to become emotionally involved in Rock Hudson's predicament, but the movie is more about the trap than the prey .. the more Hudson struggles against things he cannot control, the more we become convinced he's a doomed guinea pig, in a maze with one exit. Hudson's reactions are those of a dullard with no imagination. If Arthur Hamilton the banker is that big of a nothing, then our only reaction is to stop caring what happens to him.
Where Seconds soars is in its stylistic visuals. James Wong Howe's fisheye lens distortions of the hero's ghost world conjure up real feelings of isolation, and insect-like alienation, very effectively evoking our participation in Arthur's journey. In 1966, the only similar consistent look was to be found in experimental movies like Maya Deren's Meshes in the Afternoon. Frankenheimer and Howe's exacting, painstaking visuals were as technically sophisticated as could be for that time; several of the cameramen I knew in the '70s held Seconds as their favorite artistic film for cinematography.
Frankenheimer populates Seconds with familiar faces and former blacklistees like Will Geer and Jeff Corey; Murray Hamilton is excellent as Hudson's connection to the company. Salome Jens gives one of the few Earth-mother Malibu free spirit performances in '60s movies. She's intimate, sexy, and exhibits typical Malibu Mama behaviors like shouting personal messages to the ocean. (spoiler) We like her that way and resent it when the story pulls the rug out from under her character.
In the 1996, Paramount lengthened Seconds by replacing the original, racier cut of the scene at the Santa Barbara wine fair. It's been restored here without explanation, giving the film an R rating, and may confuse those who saw the original domestic release, which could never have contained this content. The nude scenes were found intact on an international negative for export, a French cut to be exact. Writer Bill Desowitz (now of Animation Magazine) realized the source for the restoration was a French print by watching the earlier laser release, which also cut a scene where Rock Hudson is given fake credentials for his new persona as a high-toned artist. A reference to a counterfeit diploma from the Sorbonne was missing - apparently the French censor wasn't bothered by the nudity, but couldn't abide the suggestion that the Sorbonne's integrity could be compromised!
Disc Extras:
- Scene Access with 12 cues and remote access
- 1 Original Trailer(s)
- 1 Feature/Episode commentary by Director John Frankenheimer
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