Frankenheimer\u2019s narrative \u2013 adapted by Lewis John Carlino from David Ely\u2019s novel \u2013 is far more frightening if you go in cold, so if you\u2019d like to bookmark and come back, feel free. (Promise to come back.) But the way it unfurls is truly ingenious; rather than giving us a painful exposition dump, Carlino and Frankenheimer stage an extended walk-through, with the inciting device revealing itself to the audience as it\u2019s revealed to the protagonist. Put simply: wealthy people can take advantage of a service where they are \u201creborn,\u201d their deaths faked to remove them from the lives they\u2019ve grown up with. Plastic surgery alters their appearance (and de-ages them to boot), and they\u2019re placed in a new life they\u2019ll more fully enjoy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our protagonist, recruited by an endorsing old friend, gets the hard sell (the cut from his pen signing the contract to the plastic surgery incision is one of the most sinister single edits I\u2019ve ever seen), and at the forty-minute mark, nearly halfway into the movie, the bandages come off and we meet its star, Rock Hudson. He is now \u201cMr. Wilson,\u201d shuttled out to the California coast to pursue his true passion of painting. (There is, of course, considerable subtext in Rock Hudson playing a man pretending to be something he\u2019s not.) He meets a nice woman out there, a divorcee who also walked away from her picture-perfect life. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t understand,\u201d she shrugs. \u201cI think I do,\u201d he replies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because it\u2019s California in the mid-1960s, they eventually find themselves at a wild outdoor ceremony \u2013 part wedding, part drunken bacchanal, part naked orgy, with extremely proto-hippie (and, frankly, proto-Manson) energy. People wear white robes, chant, and disrobe. Mr. Wilson looks extremely uncomfortable \u2013 our first hint that one must beware what one wishes for \u2013 and when his date tries to join in the nude revelry, he tries to pull her back, begging her not to join, until he finally goes in himself, smiling and dancing and yelling \u201cYES!\u201d The entire sequence is stunning, with Frankenheimer going full-on \u201860s weirdo semi-verit\u00e9. But it\u2019s not just style for the sake of style; he\u2019s staging a vivid visualization of this man shedding the last of his middle-class pretensions and inhibitions, and giving in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before he\u2019s sent on his journey, Wilson\u2019s handlers advise him, \u201cYou\u2019ve got what almost any middle-aged man in America would love to have: freedom.\u201d Seconds <\/em>is a lot of things \u2013 science fiction, body horror, paranoid thriller. But most of all it\u2019s social commentary, a pointed snapshot of this exact moment, this hinge of the 1960s, and the ennui that led so many (especially older) people to embrace the counter-culture. They\u2019re capturing a tangible undercurrent in the American psyche, of feverish uncertainty and vague dissatisfaction. When he\u2019s interviewed about his life early in the film, by the owner of the company that performs this service, his marriage barely warrants a mention \u2013 \u201cWe get along. We hardly ever argue\u201d \u2013 and he seems reluctant to even discuss it. Prompted to think about what he has to look forward to, he feebly mentions a possible promotion, his boat\u2026 his friends? Maybe? \u201cThere\u2019s nothing anymore, is there?\u201d asks his inquisitor. \u201cAnything at all?\u201d And there really isn\u2019t; it\u2019s all pretty vapid and empty when he stops to think about it. The spoils of the 1950s American Dream don\u2019t add up to much after all. \u201cTime for a change,\u201d purrs the salesman. Much of America was feeling the same way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, however, he can\u2019t live with whatever he becomes, and in the turns of the third act \u2013 in which Wilson goes back to the \u2018burbs and realizes what he\u2019s lost \u2013 Seconds<\/em> risks becoming a conventional \u201cbe thankful for what you have\u201d story. But there\u2019s nothing conservative about the filmmaking; Frankenheimer and his cinematographer, the great James Wong Howe (or \u201cJimmy,\u201d for you Inherent Vice<\/em> fans), use an arresting, experimental visual language to mirror their protagonist\u2019s overall mental and psychological unsteadiness. Right from Jump Street, the look is bizarre and disorienting, full of strange compositions, cameras mounted to actors, and fish-eye lensing. It\u2019s as if Frankenheimer made a conscious decision to take all the crank paranoia of The Manchurian Candidate<\/em> \u2013 not an altogether subtle picture to begin with \u2013 and crank it up to maximum volume here. This holds particularly true when the company turns the screws on him to sign up, a sequence that combines waking nightmare, rape fantasy, and blackmail material. \u201cIt\u2019s easier to go forward when you know you can\u2019t go back,\u201d he\u2019s told. No kidding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seconds<\/em> famously tanked when it hit theaters in 1966, and it\u2019s frankly understandable; general audiences probably weren\u2019t quite ready for this kind of penetrative, accusatory commentary and borderline surrealist imagery, and they sure as hell weren\u2019t ready for this ending. It spoils nothing to say that the rawness of what Rock Hudson is doing in that final scene, the genuine and unguarded terror, is some of the finest and most upsetting acting of his career, and that Frankenheimer, Howe, and editors David Newhouse and Ferris Webster, in the photography and cutting, somehow render it even more disturbing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The closing lines – \u201cYou were my best work, Mr. Wilson. Sorry it all has to end like this\u201d \u2013 are haunting, but after the credits rolled, I found myself remembering dialogue from much earlier. \u201cYou know what I\u2019m saying is true,\u201d he\u2019s told. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing anymore.\u201d Whether they meant to or not, the makers of Seconds <\/em>were summarizing the state of the nation in 1966. And in 2020 too. Seconds<\/em> is <\/em>currently streaming<\/em><\/a> on the Criterion Channel, and is available on DVD and Blu-ray<\/a> from the Criterion Collection.<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Frankenheimer\u2019s 1966 thriller Seconds is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of their Saul Bass centennial,and his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":14082,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1381],"tags":[1431,1422,162],"class_list":["post-14079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-movies","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22831,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14079\/revisions\/22831"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/seconds2-1024x576.jpg\")
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