Seconds
A second chance to live. A second chance to die.
Academy Award® nominee Rock Hudson delivers a power-house performance in this critically acclaimed suspense-thriller from director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May and three-time Emmy Award® winner).
Desperate to escape his dreary, dead-end life, aging banker Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) succumbs to a mysterious organization's offer of a new identity and a fresh start. Surgically transformed into the handsome, young Tony Wilson (Hudson), he begins a jet-set existence among a shadowy community of similar "Reborns". But Tony's heady exhilaration spirals into a heart-stopping terror as he discovers that his newly purchased life carries a terrifying price.
Member Reviews
a minor classic - macangus
Frankenheimer is a director with an undeservedly small oeuvre - consider the Manchurian Candidate (the original) also in B&W, another minor classic, not to mention Grand Prix - not a great film perhaps, but its racing sequences are definitive; and Ronin - an intriguing thriller, described by one critic as "an extended car chase with pit stops for plot development" - not entirely fair, but the man does know how to shoot cars in action.
"Seconds" has none, but as a dissection of the anomie of 50s conformity in collision with 60s "liberation" there are few equals.
The film's protagonist, Arthur Hamilton, seeks liberation from the stifling conformity of his suburban lifestyle through a change of skin - becoming Rock Hudson - but a leopard may be able to change his spots, but he is still a leopard - and Hamilton/Wilson is even less comfortable in his new skin than his old. A parable about the nature of rebirth, with brilliantly surreal photography.
Footnote; Rock Hudson was famously dissatisfied with the ephemeral nature of most of his oeuvre - this is probably the one film of his that is still watcheable (at least, not as camp) - a successful change of skin?noir on acid - 2commit
What’s most fascinating about this film is the black and white photography. The odd angles and extreme closups have an unsettling and disturbing quality to them; every character seems coated in a sheen of sweat; a camera dolly following a character’s movements lends him a “floating” gait that is at odds with the surrounding structures. Al told, this suspense/thriller looks pretty dated now.Seconds are Death itself - Coco
O cruel odometer! “What Are Seconds?... The Answer May Be Too Terrifying For Words!” What a great, old-school Roger Corman snake-oil Tagline that is! Although seconds, like minutes (and the cinema, in fact, which works in both just as novels work in words and sentences), are simply about death at work, over time, lazily ‘happening to us’. The terrifying thing is not what Americans die like (which is: fat Elvis on the toilet, squeezing too hard!), but the lengths to which Americans are, a good many of them, willing to go to put death at a functionary distance, like a chore to be hired out to Mexicans. Why do all actresses eventually have to look like Jack Nicholson in Batman? Doubtlessly it was in the fine print of whatever Mephistopheles had them sign on the eve of their Sweet Sixteen. That’s kinda what a lot of sci-fi in the 60s and 70s was parenthetically about; ceramic death for ceramic people … the Westworldification of sunny So Cal. Frankenheimer’s frankenfilm, then, would be The Great Gatsby of the 1960s … that is if people could only get their head out of Philip Roth’s arse for a second what to notice! Like John Collier, Ray Bradbury, and some Nazi scientists hickjacked a Douglas Sirk pic with their hands in Tim Leary’s private stash of red, white, and blue tracers. Way groovy.
C)00(C2011107003
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a minor classic - macangus
Frankenheimer is a director with an undeservedly small oeuvre - consider the Manchurian Candidate (the original) also in B&W, another minor classic, not to mention Grand Prix - not a great film perhaps, but its racing sequences are definitive; and Ronin - ...noir on acid - 2commit
What’s most fascinating about this film is the black and white photography. The odd angles and extreme closups have an unsettling and disturbing quality to them; every character seems coated in a sheen of sweat; a camera dolly following a character’s movements ...Seconds are Death itself - Coco
O cruel odometer! “What Are Seconds?... The Answer May Be Too Terrifying For Words!” What a great, old-school Roger Corman snake-oil Tagline that is! Although seconds, like minutes (and the cinema, in fact, which works in both just as novels work in words ...