Let's face it, folks.  Most of us Monster Boomers are getting on the wrong side of forty and some of us are even in our fifties!  Our joints creak, our liver biles, and we just don't have that old get-up-and-go.  Wouldn't it be cool if you could go to the doctor and be made young again?  Well, maybe, but Monster Boomers are also aware of a film made by John Frankenheimer that addresses this very notion--and after watching it, one would get few "ayes" to the question...

By HARVEY CHARTRAND

In the early to mid-sixties, the late John Frankenheimer was the hottest director in Hollywood, helming some of the greatest pictures of that era – The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a "nightmare comedy" about the Cold War, starring Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh; the memorable biopic Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), with Burt Lancaster; Seven Days in May (1964), a thriller about a military coup in Washington, D.C., starring Kirk Douglas and Ava Gardner; and The Train (1964), an action-adventure story about the French Resistance, with Lancaster and Jeanne Moreau.

Frankenheimer’s next project was his dark masterpiece Seconds (1966), which takes a horror plot and grounds it in suburban reality -- it’s as if Richard Matheson and John Cheever collaborated on a screenplay. Based on a novel by David Ely, Seconds is about a mysterious organization that offers a dream-come-true: the ability to start your life over with a new identity, appearance and career. Like all good offers, though, this one comes with Faustian strings attached.

A triumph of style and technique, Seconds tells this story in an extremely unconventional, almost surreal way. The totally original ‘look and feel’ of the film inspires a strange dread; Seconds terrifies without using a single horror movie convention. (Unfortunately, though it is now acknowledged as a classic of contemporary horror, Seconds was a critical and box office flop when it was first released, and marked a turning point in Frankenheimer’s career. He was no longer Hollywood’s Golden Boy and his later work wasn’t as inspired.)

Seconds begins in the workaday world of New York City. Homely, middle-aged Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is bored with his routine existence. A Manhattan bank manager, he shares a lovely suburban home with an aging wife he no longer desires.

Late one night, Arthur gets a call from his best friend Charlie (Murray Hamilton), who has supposedly been dead for years. Charlie tells Arthur about an opportunity to start a new life as a ‘reborn.’ He directs Arthur to visit Seconds, a mysterious corporation that supplies people with new lives. For a substantial fee, and with the assurance that his "widow" will be properly taken care of, Arthur is then transformed into Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson) via a faked death, intensive plastic surgery and physical conditioning. Soon he's a successful painter living in a California beach house, with a manservant (Wesley Addy) and a sexy girlfriend (Salome Jens), yet something's not quite right.

Hudson-as-Tony doesn't take well to his new bohemian life in Malibu and starts to break a few of the rules second-chancers must live under, thereby planting the seeds of his own destruction. (One great source of dissatisfaction for Tony is that he can’t paint. All of his signed paintings are provided for him by Seconds. Despite lessons, Tony has no talent as an artist or any great artistic statement to make.) Resolutely despondent, he demands to be reborn again, but refuses to cooperate with the corporation by bringing in a new prospect, thereby sealing his fate.

Right from Saul Bass’s creepy opening credits (with images of distorted faces seemingly being ripped apart) and Jerry Goldsmith's eerie theme music (using a pipe organ), Seconds is immediately unsettling, but not quite like any other horror film ever made. In the opening scenes, shadowy figures approach and entice Arthur toward the services of the secret corporation as he struggles through the crowds to catch his commuter train at Grand Central Terminal.

Seconds is an engrossing film with many brilliantly staged scenes and superb acting. Hudson’s good looks perfectly suit the role of a man who tries to outwardly become his inner ideal. Seconds provides an especially gutsy role for its star. Hudson pulls out all the stops in this one — cavorting with nude revelers at a bacchanalian celebration, getting genuinely drunk on-camera to loosen up for a pivotal party scene, and freaking out in a terrible-to-behold way for the shocking climax.

Handsome Hudson even manages to exude the personality of dumpy Randolph, who peeks through Hudson’s sad eyes and is revealed in his rather defeated bearing.

In a 1996 interview with TVOntario, Frankenheimer explained that he wanted Laurence Olivier to play Arthur Hamilton and Tony Wilson. Olivier was the only actor who could have pulled it off, Frankenheimer believed. But the producers didn’t want Olivier, who was no longer a big box office draw.

Then Hudson called Frankenheimer and asked for a meeting. He’d heard about the script and campaigned hard for an audition with the director. Hudson was under the impression that two different actors would play Arthur Hamilton and Tony Wilson. Frankenheimer, always fast on his feet, readily agreed. At first, he didn’t want to use Hudson, whom he thought of as a second-rate actor, but the producers forced his hand. They needed a guaranteed box office draw to star in the picture. Later on, Frankenheimer would revise his opinion of Hudson’s talent upwards. The part obviously had a deep significance for the actor, a tortured homosexual who had a macho image to live up to and spent much of his life pretending to be a ladies’ man.

Tony Wilson has everything but still can’t (or won't) cheer up. The viewer wonders — How can Tony resist happiness as embodied in the attractive, warm and intelligent girl-next-door played by Ms. Jens, unless Seconds is more influenced by its star’s "double life" than has previously been acknowledged? Hudson’s gay sexual orientation was an open secret in Hollywood, if not yet common knowledge among the ticket-buying public. And the names "Tony Wilson" and "Rock Hudson" resemble each other, containing the exact same number of letters and syllables.

Some scenes in Seconds are very unsettling: Hudson’s realization that all his new friends and guests at his house party are "reborns"; the sinister aura of Seconds’ founder, a seemingly folksy old man who comes to talk to Hudson before his second rebirth (an excellent performance by Will Geer, who betrays something cold and ruthless beneath his avuncular exterior).

The final sequence is perfect in its build-up through slow revelation of detail — photographs being taken of Tony as he is prepped for surgery, the priest coming to ask about Tony’s faith as he is wheeled on a stretcher into the operating theatre and then read the last rites, revealing that he will not be reborn, but instead killed and recycled as a body in a faked death. The last words Tony hears as the surgical drill bears down on his skull are those of the surgeon, effectively played by Richard Anderson: "I’m sorry it had to come to this. You were my best work."

Frankenheimer ratchets up the style-meter full tilt and that is what grants Seconds its legendary status, despite having been booed at the Cannes Film Festival during its first-ever public screening. Seconds was just too bleak and unsettling and ahead of its time. Frankenheimer’s use of strange camera angles, jarring cuts, unflattering close-ups, and the disorienting wide-angle and fish-eye lens cinematography of James Wong Howe, make Seconds much more disturbing than it might have been if filmed in a more conventional manner (like the pedestrian The Stepford Wives, which might have been scary on paper, but certainly not in its cinematic execution).

Seconds’ clear and horrible message is that most people, if given a second chance, would not know what to do with it. Implicit in this message is the grim realization that many of the "reborns" likely suffer the same fate as Tony Wilson.

Note: Frankenheimer’s other macabre works are lesser efforts: Prophecy (1979), an eco-thriller about mutant monsters in Maine; and a bizarre remake of The Island Of Dr. Moreau (1996), with Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer (Frankenheimer replaced director Richard Stanley on the latter project). In 1992, Frankenheimer directed Maniac At Large, an episode of Tales from the Crypt starring Clarence Williams III, Blythe Danner, Adam Ant and (again!) Salome Jens.

Thanks, Harv!  Truly, Seconds is John Frankenheimer at the top of his form and it's also about the only film that convincingly argues that there are worse things than growing old--like the alternative to growing old, for example.  With the wave of remakes plaguing Hollywood these days, can we expect a sequel to Seconds, maybe entitled Seconds The Second Time Around and starring ever-young-looking Dick Clark?  The mind reels.

Article copyright © Harvey Chartrand

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