In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) seems to have achieved the American dream: a successful white-collar career, a lovely wife (Frances Reid), a daughter happily married to a doctor, and a comfortable home in a leafy suburb. He even owns a station wagon that his wife uses to pick him up from the commuter train. And yet there’s an emptiness at the core of his life that prevents him from being happy. He could look within himself for answers, or seek professional help, or he could just pull a Flitcraft and ditch his current life and start over as someone new.
Thus begins John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, with a screenplay from Lewis John Carlino based on Arthur Ely’s 1963 novel of the same name. It’s the third film is Frankenheimer’s “Paranoia Trilogy,” after The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964) and, unlike the first two films, is more concerned with the personal than the political. It’s also more of a genre film, mainly science fiction with horror elements, and declares from its opening credits (by Saul Bass) that it will not take place within the reliably comfortable visual world of the Hollywood invisible style. Instead, viewing Seconds is like watching a story about 1960s America set in a haunted mansion that can only be viewed through the distortions of a funhouse mirror.
Hamilton’s move to escape his malaise is set in motion when he receives a phone call from his old friend Charlie (Murray Hamilton), whom he thought to be dead. The next day, a stranger presses a piece of paper with an address written on it into his hand, and that night he receives another phone call from Charlie, who reveals knowledge of several things that only a close friend would know. So Hamilton goes to the address and thus sets in motion the journey that brings him to the Company that can make his dreams come true for a simple fee of $30,000 (over $300,000 in 2026 dollars). And he can’t back out, because the Company begins the process by acquiring kompromat on him during a visually arresting sequence.
Taking on his new identity requires plastic surgery, and when he awakes from it, he’s transformed into the much younger and better-looking Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson). Tony lives in Malibu, is a successful artist, and soon acquires an attractive and uninhibited younger partner named Nora (Salome Jens). She takes him to a Bacchanalian festival where people stomp grapes, get drunk, and get naked, and he finally manages to step outside his malaise. So now he’s happy, right?
Just kidding. There are many ways to interpret Seconds, and that is one of the reasons why it went from box office bomb to cult classic. You could take is as near cousin to several Twilight Zone episodes about the emptiness of the cult of success.* Or as cautionary tale about being careful what you wish for, keeping in mind Truman Capote’s warning that “more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” My personal favorite is that it’s the story of a man who realizes, too late, that he’s nothing but a mediocrity whose successful life was based on the unearned privilege of being a white man in postwar America.
Besides the intellectual interest of the story, three other things stand out. One is the cinematography of James Wong Howe, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on this film (losing out to Haskell Wexler for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). The second is the brilliant work of a talented squad of character actors including Jeff Corey, Murray Hamilton, Will Geer, and Khigh Diegh, each of whom delivers a memorable and convincing performance without being so well-known as to be distracting (as Hudson would have been in any role but the lead). The third is Frankenheimer’s insistence on shooting in real locations, including Grand Central Station, Scarsdale, and Malibu, a choice that made for some difficulties in production but lends a necessary sense of reality to this dystopian science fiction tale. | Sarah Boslaugh
*”A Stop at Willoughby” and “Walking Distance” come immediately to mind.
Spine #: 667
Technical details: 107 min. ; B&W; screen ratio 1.75:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD (1 disc).
Extras: audio commentary by director John Frankenheimer (full of details about how the film was made and why he made the creative choices he did); interview with actor Alec Baldwin (he’s a fan of the film and was directed by Frankenheimer in the 2002 HBO film Path to War); excerpt from a 1965 Hollywood on the Hudson episode including interview with Rock Hudson and on-set footage; making-of featurette including interviews with Evans Evans (Frankenheimer’s widow) and actor Salome Jens; 1971 interview with Frankenheimer; visual essay by film scholars R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance; illustrated booklet with an essay by critic David Sterritt.
Fun Fact: The opening sequence in Grand Central Station, in which Arthur Hamilton was surrounded by real commuters, was accomplished by creating a division: a Playboy Bunny making out with a male model while being filmed by a fake camera crew while the film’s actual footage was captured by a camera hidden inside a suitcase.
Parting Thought: Seconds is set in a world of white men, with women treated mainly as accessories that are sometimes useful but never important, and people of color don’t exist. The clients of the Company are also white men, and so are the preponderance of people who work for it. Is the decision to make this dystopia white and male simply a reflection of American society (and Hollywood filmmaking) of the time or a criticism of those realities?
