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. read more
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