John Frankenheimer (1966)
Anything starring Rock Hudson in the role of someone with an artificially created identity is bound to have a sad, possibly undeserved resonance. Watching this John Frankenheimer film for the first time, more than twenty years after Hudson’s death, it’s virtually impossible to separate him and the role he’s playing. Antiochus (Tony) Wilson is the reconstituted persona, following extensive plastic surgery and psychoanalysis, of a middle-aged banker called Arthur Hamilton. Tony is an artist, set up in a bleakly opulent beach house in Malibu, far from the commuter suburbia where the banker led his increasingly arid existence. Hamilton undergoes this re-engineering process because it offers the chance of a second life more fulfilling than the one he’s leaving behind. We learn that the original impulse behind this reincarnation treatment was benevolent but that it has now been perverted into a commercial enterprise by ‘The Company’. Waiting for the remade star to materialise makes the first half hour of Seconds a largely anticipatory experience – even though John Randolph, as Hamilton, makes a strong impression, which stays with you throughout the film. Once Hudson emerges from the operating theatre and his bandages are unswathed, Seconds is an odd mixture of science-fiction film conventions and scenes which fix it in the sixties – but perhaps a bit ahead of its time. A bacchanal sequence isn’t just visually remarkable: it adumbrates ‘happening’ scenes that became familiar in American films later in the decade and into the early 70s. The familiar sci-fi elements include, in spite of Frankenheimer’s proven talent as a director of actors, a fair amount of overemphatic but neutered characterisation. Salome Jens, as a woman whom Tony meets on the beach, is a more android presence than any of the ‘reborns’ who are Tony’s neighbours in Malibu (this in spite of her bacchanalian social life). She turns out not to be one of them but a representative of The Company.
Because the film is so focused on Tony, Hudson has to shoulder almost sole responsibility for developing the (interesting) themes in the material. Until, in the closing stages, he meets the college friend who recommended him for the treatment, Tony seems to be the only character who fails to adjust to his own identity. Also in contrast to the other reborns, he retains a human individuality. When, at the end of his meet-the-neighbours party, a drunken Tony is set upon by a pack of reborn guests, it’s clear enough that they turn against him because they’ve adjusted to their new lives and don’t want anyone to rock the boat. It’s not clear whether they’re happier in their recreated lives or whether satisfactory adjustment has been achieved only through a loss of free will – and, if so, how The Company makes that happen. This lack of clarity has a troubling affect but it increases the burden on Hudson. Although he consistently exudes unhappiness, he often seems uncertain. He gets a chance to show some of his flair for comedy in the housewarming sequence and he’s remarkably good in the scene in which – against the rules of The Company – he visits Hamilton’s home and, posing as a friend of her late husband, talks with his widow. Hudson’s fusion of nostalgia for the life he’s lost and his recognition that it didn’t make him happy when he lived in it is very touching.
The screenplay, by Lewis John Carlino, is adapted from a novel by David Ely. Some very distinguished craftsmen were at work on Seconds – the cinematographer is James Wong Howe, the score is by Jerry Goldsmith. The supporting cast includes Jeff Corey, Will Geer, Murray Hamilton, Frances Reid (Hamilton’s wife) and Wesley Addy, as Tony’s solicitous, quietly sinister valet in his new life on the California coast. The Wikipedia entry for the film notes that ‘The “reborns” of the plot are ironically paralleled in a different context – three of the principal actors were proscribed from Hollywood films during the “Blacklist” years of the Fifties’.
24 September 2008
