Seconds (1966)
Paramount DVD (region 1)
d. John Frankenheimer; pr. Edward Lewis, John Frankenheimer; scr. Lewis John Carlino; novel. David Ely; ph. James Wong Howe; m. Jerry Goldsmith; ed. David Newhouse, Ferris Webster; cast. Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Will Geer, Salome Jens, Jeff Corey, Murray Hamilton, Khigh Dhiegh (107 mins)
John Frankenheimer was at the peak of his career when he directed Seconds.
He had broken through into feature film in the late 1950s after a successful stint in live television and in the years 1962 to 1966 established himself as one of the most distinctive and important of new American directors. However, his unbroken run of critical and popular hits ended with Seconds. Despite the film being decidedly experimental in style, premise and narrative, all concerned with it thought they had something special. Indeed, the studio even reportedly pulled strings in order to make the film the official American entry at the Cannes Film Festival that year. The film’s problems began at Cannes, where it was vociferously attacked partly out of resentment for what many considered its inhumanity. The studio was finally uncertain of how to release it but it crept through nonetheless. Although it starred Rock Hudson, then also at the height of his box-office stardom, it was a vast departure from his usual type of material and his core fans stayed away. Conversely, director Frankenheimer would later postulate that the type of people interested in the subject matter also stayed away, but ironically because of Hudson’s presence. Indeed, much of the film’s cult interest now stems from Hudson’s work, in a role initially proposed to Laurence Olivier and what would prove to be undoubtedly the most daring part of his career.
Seconds begins abruptly, with a middle-aged banker (John Randolph) followed in a train station and given a piece of paper with an address on it. At home he gets a phone call from someone purporting to be a recently dead friend. The distraught Randolph is disinterested in his wife and the next day goes in search of the address.
Finding it, he is led to a mysterious organization known simply as “the company” where he is told of an opportunity to give him a new start on life, a second chance to do it right, but this time in a whole new body, complete with fake identity. After some deliberation, he is convinced (almost blackmailed) to participate by a grandfatherly and seemingly benign man (Will Geer). After the procedure, he awakens in a new body (and is now played by Rock Hudson). He is given a new identity – that of a successful painter – based on interviews taken with him when he was seemingly drugged. In a new beachside home, he slowly adjusts to his second existence, aided by a servant from “the company”. However, he is reluctant to participate in events around him and is remote until he meets a woman (Salome Jens) who initiates him into a hedonistic community. During a Bacchanal wine festival, Hudson finally loses his inhibitions and welcomes his newfound freedom. However, during a subsequent party in which he gets introspectively drunk, he begins to guiltily doubt himself and soon wonders about his wife.
Seconds is as dazzling and unique as Frankenheimer’s acknowledged masterwork The Manchurian Candidate. It is a nightmarish examination of the inescapability of one’s own nature, suggesting that a life lived and all that the personality has accumulated during such cannot be suppressed.
The effort to live life again is thus doomed to failure by design, as much as it is a product of middle aged delusion in the youthful upheaval of the 1960s. As much as Randolph desires a new life, he cannot escape the feeling that his life as Hudson is also a put-on and that ultimately he too must somehow start again. The bleak sadness in this film comes from its realization that a sad, passionless and unfulfilled life will never be more than that. What people experience in life determines who they are, and the idealized notion of a second chance to do things differently is nothing more than a dangerous false hope. Middle aged discontent over a failed life is all there is left these men, and in reaction to it they have succumbed to a mad challenge to the designs of nature and God. The irony is deeper in that this sacrilegious defiance is the basis for a fully functioning, illicit corporation: as if to suggest that corporate Capitalism is itself a challenge to the natural order. The tragedy of the 1960s is thus that of an ageing generation forced to confront the banal failure of their values and the impossibility of their desire to do it all again.
There is no salvation in this film, no respite from pitiful disillusionment. In this world, the grandfatherly Geer, patriarchal head of the “company”, is a Mephistophelian monster and what Hudson realizes too late is that he is no longer in charge of his own destiny; that his second chance is a fabrication.
But rather than admit that he cannot put his own past behind him, he believes that he just needs yet another chance, in a different body. The horror thus comes from this simultaneous desire to flee from one’s own identity coupled with the attempt to suppress the knowledge that this is impossible. Futile, it makes for a resounding sense of desolation. Just as the film explores the transition from a life of rigid longing to another of potentially limitless indulgence, so does it suggest that the individual identity cannot ultimately be re-defined and will re-assert itself. The promises of sensorial and social liberation and of being suddenly rid of one’s responsibilities prove illusory as Hudson cannot free himself from the real burden, his own sense of self. Guilt and regret eventually consume this man, leading him into a false sense of pride, a delusional belief that he can manipulate “the company” and regain control of his own destiny. This is the lament of middle-age, the effort to regain control of a life slipping inexorably into despair. In trying to regain control by repeatedly redefining himself, Randolph/Hudson only loses his soul.
DVD DETAILS:
Vision
Seconds is a bleakly philosophical and astonishingly stylized movie and is given a sterling anamorphic widescreen transfer. There has always been a tension in Frankenheimer’s work between the documentary and the grotesque and in this film the mix is most bizarre, fusing perfectly in the wine-vat sequence. Offbeat camera angles abound, with almost every shot done with a wide-angle lens’ distortion of space and composition. It makes for a nightmarish and Kafka-esque film (more indulgent even than Orson Welles at his most baroque) where the premise is never fully explained and never is there the sense that the protagonist has any control. The sheer horror of being robbed of self-determination is conveyed in this interplay of realism and Expressionism, resulting in overwhelming unease and paranoia. Camerawork is frequently nervous as hand-held instability alternates with fluid tracking shots, always with oblique, disorienting angles – the contribution of cinematographer James Wong Howe who worked out the elaborate visual style in collaboration with the director. Stark, grim realism bursts into the grotesque and then retracts again until the next eruption, making this unusual stylistic ebb and flow decidedly psychedelic. Never again would Frankenheimer achieve this as vividly and effectively as he does in Seconds. It is captivating from the stunning opening credits sequence by Saul Bass to the shocking conclusion.
Sound
The sound transfer is in Dolby Digital mono, nicely enhancing a stark, unrelenting quality. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is suitably ominous and jarring, adding to the perceptual uncertainty by using unusual instruments and a repeated funereal organ, indicative of Hudson’s eventual reckoning. Realistic details are often precise and chilling (a train especially being a jarring intrusion). The score is frequently allowed to abruptly crash and give way to source sounds, documentary realism emerging out of the grotesque and then back. The ironic gentility in Geer’s voice is well used, the film aware of the malevolence that hides within the genteel and the clinical. Hudson plays well here: the sense of the increasing drunken despair and anguish of this introspective man is vividly realized in the party scene; his gradually narcotically subdued cries of despair in the finale are especially unsettling – likewise the indifference of Randolph to his wife speaks silently to his own sense of sexual discontent. Death is never far away however, the score always reminding the viewer of the paranoid sense of perception that gradually distorts the reality around Hudson. Disorientation nicely surrenders to sensorial indulgence in the wine festival scenes, which have a cinema verite sense of natural sound and rhythm, which peaks in Hudson’s finally unrestrained howl of glee, however short-lived this liberation proves to be.
Special Features
For special features are an original trailer and a Frankenheimer commentary track. In it he talks of the opening title sequence and about the then-revolutionary use of wide-angle lenses to both distort the scene and keep backgrounds in focus at all times. There is much about his visual style (his preference for low angle shots and his “signature shot” – looming foregrounds with figures in midground) and on working with Howe. He talks of wishing to show Randolph as a tormented man unhappy with his own life, and muses on the casting. Mention is made of his desire to create an unstable world where little is certain and how he used visual distortion to encompass this ideal, to take the film out of the documentary realism usually associated with black and white. The alternately fragmentary and fluid editing rhythms are highlighted as is the use of longish takes, with the director admitting that he is not a fan of the incessant cutting of films influenced by MTV. He talks of other collaborators and of how he was forced to edit the wine-vat scene in order for the Catholic Church not to condemn the film on moral grounds. There are production anecdotes, including the fact that Hudson really got drunk to play certain scenes and that Frankenheimer thus used multiple cameras so as not to miss anything. He admits that the film was shot mainly in sequence and that this possibly aided Hudson’s performance. It is an insightful and engaging commentary track.
The Art-House Flop that was Turned into an Action Hit
an extract from Robert Cettl's book Film Tales: Movie Trivia in the Age of DVD (on sale now in print and soon in e-book)
Director John Frankenheimer was coasting on his reputation when he came to make Seconds, perhaps his most ambitious film to that date (1966). For this science-fiction stunner acclaimed thespian Laurence Olivier was initially sought for the lead role.
The great Olivier was intrigued by the role and the film’s premise and wanted to do it. However, the studio backers in Hollywood didn’t feel that Olivier was a big-enough drawcard – they went instead with an actor they felt would bring in more people: Rock Hudson. Hudson was a bit reluctant unless there was a script change that made the role less demanding but approached the film with gusto, turning in one of his best performances. Strings were pulled and the movie was entered in the prestigious Cannes Film Festival where it was greeted by vociferous objection and on general cinema release flopped disastrously.
Some thirty years later, the action movie script for the eventual John Travolta / Nicolas Cage movie Face/Off was turned down at script stage by four major studios before Paramount accepted it. It was there that it attracted Hong Kong director John Woo who was struck by the film’s twist on motifs found in a sci-fi film that had long fascinated Woo – Seconds.
