Seconds (1966)
Directed by John Frankenheimer
An unhappy middle-aged banker agrees to a procedure that will fake his death and give him a completely new look and identity; one that comes with its own price.
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Starkly lit and dizzyingly shot (Howe once strapped on a pair of roller skates to film a boxing match, for 1947's Body and Soul), Seconds fulfills Frankenheimer's vision of a cinematic point-of-view that represents the distorted perspective of madness.
Seconds was seen as a significant acting departure for Hudson, whose career in the late 1960s was on a downward slide after successfully working in several of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas (including All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind) and a number of romantic comedies with Doris Day in the late ’50s and early ’60s (the most famous being Pillow Talk).
Seconds was seen as a significant acting departure for Hudson, whose career in the late 1960s was on a downward slide after successfully working in several of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas (including All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind) and a number of romantic comedies with Doris Day in the late ’50s and early ’60s (the most famous being Pillow Talk).
Seconds was seen as a significant acting departure for Hudson, whose career in the late 1960s was on a downward slide after successfully working in several of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas (including All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind) and a number of romantic comedies with Doris Day in the late ’50s and early ’60s (the most famous being Pillow Talk).
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Yet, what really grabs you in Seconds is the unique visual style created by director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) and prolific cinematographer James Wong Howe, whose credentials stretch back to the 1920s.
A colossal flop upon its original 1966 release, this absorbing oddity from director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) has deservedly picked up a sizable cult following over the ensuing decades.
For the ultimate de-programming scene of John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, a second-unit director made the mistake of filming all of Frank Sinatra's dialogue just slightly out of focus.
Frankenheimer is responsible for a proto-style with The Manchurian Candidate, in which Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is occupied by Red China and the viewer in fear of such, and the anti-communist presidential coup of the Rod Serling-scripted Seven Days in May.
It is also a brilliantly-told parable, from the great John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Ronin) whose use of long shots, long takes, wide-angle lenses, and always-just-a-little-skewed framing gives Seconds the uncomfortable feel of a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Just four years after 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer produced a film so thick with distrust of modern America that it makes that more controversial film look like a run-of-the-mill thriller in comparison.
The first thing that you'll notice about Seconds, the concluding film in John Frankenheimer's thematic "paranoia trilogy" (following The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May), is the amazing cinematography by legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe (Hud, Picnic).
Part Rod Serling, part John Cheever, Seconds succeeds in combining two film styles and completes Frankenheimer�s paranoia trilogy after the brilliant The Manchurian Candidate and the under-rated Seven Days In May.
Frankenheimer is responsible for a proto-style with The Manchurian Candidate, in which Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is occupied by Red China and the viewer in fear of such, and the anti-communist presidential coup of the Rod Serling-scripted Seven Days in May.
In 1964, Seven Days in May imagined a Pentagon plot to overthrow the presidency in order to wage war on the Soviets; vilifying the war-mongers in the military establishment years before popular anti-war sentiment made it chic.
A creepy sci-fi parable that is directed with much too much restraint by John Frankenheimer ("The Manchurian Candidate"/"Seven Days in May"--the other two films of this "paranoia trilogy") to make this the breakthrough film it could have been, though there's a sharpened edge to this bizarre story that gets under your skin like a nightmare and leaves you thinking about your own life.
The off-kilter nature of the film’s visual approach starts from the first images in the opening credits sequence designed by Saul Bass (who designed many of Hitchcock’s most famous openings, including Vertigo and Psycho), which presents us with grotesquely distorted and fragmented images of panic and agony in a man’s face.
With the main character’s physical transformation, through a secretive plastic surgery service, Seconds offers an experience akin to Psycho (not to mention the titles by Saul Bass), which, through more plausible means, disposes of its lead character for another.
The off-kilter nature of the film’s visual approach starts from the first images in the opening credits sequence designed by Saul Bass (who designed many of Hitchcock’s most famous openings, including Vertigo and Psycho), which presents us with grotesquely distorted and fragmented images of panic and agony in a man’s face.
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Reminding me a great deal of Richard Burton �s performance in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Hudson�s emotional grip on his new reality starting to come crashing down around him and the oddness of the situation is only enhanced by James Wong Howe�s magnificent cinematography.