Seconds (1966)

Directed by John Frankenheimer. Starring Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Salome Jens, Jeff Corey, Frances Reid, Will Geer, Wesley Addy, Murray Hamilton, Richard Anderson, Khigh Dhiegh, Karl Swenson. [R]

Unnerving science fiction story plays like an episode of “The Twilight Zone” expanded with more detail and existential anxiety/regret. Aging, disillusioned Arthur Hamilton (Randolph) leads a listless life with a tedious banking job and emotionally-distant wife (Reid), so he takes up an offer from a sinister company to give him a “second chance”: fake his death, alter his age and appearance and voice through surgery, and set him up with a different identity to pursue a life as a painter. Frankenheimer tackles the Faustian-bargain material with a combination of wistful peculiarity and paranoid urgency, aided immeasurably by James Wong Howe’s surreal, disorienting camerawork. Fashionably advanced for the mid-60s, it’s lost a step or two since, with the grape-stomping hippie bacchanal scene dating the story more than anything else; it’s also the weakest sequence in the film because the depiction of the protagonist’s disintegrating inhibitions overstays its welcome and never becomes fully convincing within the uncomfortable confines of the chilling, edgy aesthetic. In a career outlier performance, Hudson is uncommonly good as the “refurbished” Arthur (now going by Tony)…although recasting still might have improved the thing. Just maybe don’t ask Brian Wilson what he thought of the movie. Scribe Lewis John Carlino adapted from David Ely’s book.

81/100