This morning I also watched one of the most nihilistic movies ever made: Seconds, the 1965 John Frankenheimer-directed science fiction thriller featuring John Randolph as a middle-aged businessman who gets in touch with a secret organization and is offered a second chance at life through extensive plastic surgery that remodels him into avant-garde painter Rock Hudson. “Seconds had a theme that fascinated me: the old American bullshit about having to be young, the whole myth that financial security is happiness — you could keep going for half an hour about what Seconds really means,” Frankenheimer said to Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse. It’s one of those frustrating movies that doesn’t quite work, but manages to be a lot more interesting than less ambitious movies that do work (Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett, Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn and Marnie, and Welles’ The Trial are other examples on my list). What’s problematic about it is that, after a fascinating first half — detailing the minutiae of how Randolph lives his life, how alienated he is, why he would want the services of an organization like this in the first place and just how the mysterious secret organization actually remodels people surgically and gives them new identities (with the macabre final twist withheld until the ending for a last frisson) — the movie is a letdown.
As Frankenheimer readily acknowledged in the above
interview, “We always knew we had a weakness in the second act, which was why
he didn’t adjust to life in California.” The letdown isn’t simply that Rock
Hudson is the film’s star (like Huston in Moby Dick, Frankenheimer wanted Laurence Olivier as his star,
and was turned down because Olivier wasn’t considered a big enough box office
“name”) but that Hudson’s own uncertainty about his gifts as an actor led
Frankenheimer to abandon his original intent of having the same actor play the
character “before” and “after.” Judith Crist called the entire second half of
this film “funny by mistake,” mainly because of Hudson’s casting, but Hudson
really did try to act the part,
and actually managed it very well. The problem is the writing simply isn’t
strong enough to suggest that he’s finding this life as dull and boring as he
did his businessman’s existence — this movie’s whole nihilistic point for
existing in the first place; as Frankenheimer put it in his interview, “[T]here
are lots of people going to psychiatrists, trying to get away from what they
are. You are what you are, and you live with yourself, and that’s what life is
all about. This man couldn’t, and ended up with an appalling situation on his
hands.” But Frankenheimer and his writer, Lewis John Carlino, never did solve
that second-act problem of explaining why his “reborn” situation turned out so
appallingly. (It’s interesting to note here the high suicide rate among
post-operative transsexuals — people who are surgically remodeled in the same
way as the Seconds character, and
for the same reason: because they feel alienated from “life” as they have known
and lived with, and believe a different arrangement of body parts will give
them the happiness that has eluded them in the bodies they are born with.
Sometimes it does seem to work; other times — more often, I dare say — it
doesn’t.)
Also, the two actors don’t match that well. John Randolph
was right-handed and Hudson was left-handed, and while Frankenheimer tried to work around that, he didn’t succeed — one notices
Randolph lighting his cigarette with his right hand and Hudson pouring himself
a drink with his left hand, and one figures the plastic surgeons in this movie
are as remarkable as the one in Ed Wood’s Jail Bait, who managed to add six inches to Timothy Farrell’s
height in the course of altering his face. Seconds is trying for a Kafka-esque effect, and despite
James Wong Howe’s remarkable photography (with plenty of distortion effects —
including such liberal use of the fish-eye lens he essentially educated the
rest of Hollywood’s cinematographers about the existence of that particular
piece of equipment), which really manages to create a disorienting effect even
within pretty ordinary-looking environments, it doesn’t quite come off — and
yet it’s a marvelously compelling movie in its own quirky way (especially the
first half, and also the final scene, in which Randolph/Hudson finally realizes
his second operation will not be
another “rebirth,” but a simple execution so he can supply a dummy corpse for
another one of the mysterious company’s “clients”). — 6/13/95
•••••
The address turns out to be a pants-pressing shop whose main worker tells Hamilton, “Oh, they’ve moved.” Their new address turns out to be a meat-packing plant (it’s a nice ironic touch to have this ultra-exclusive service catering to the 1 percent being run out of proletarian venues as fronts) run by a man named “Crazy Arnie” whose vans advertise his service selling, not used cars, but “used cows.” (This is a bizarre in-joke reflecting Frankenheimer’s first job on TV as writer and director for a program called Harvey Howard’s Western Roundup. Howard was a huckster who would rent you a registered Hereford cow, supply one of his bulls to impregnate it for you, and then you could sell the resulting calves. They “only had two cameras,” Frankenheimer recalled, “and there was a choice of cutting to Harvey or the cow, and since both looked exactly the same, it was difficult to tell the difference.”) When Hamilton finally encounters the sinister organization, among its secret locations are a giant room where people appear to be working at a row of desks not that different from the back area of Hamilton’s bank. He has misgivings about whether he really wants to undergo the promised “rebirth” but the organization takes that decision away from him by drugging him, putting him in a room with a woman, and filming him as, stripped of his inhibitions by the drugs, he apparently rapes her. He thinks this has all been a dream — and so do we — until he’s shown the film and told that the company will send it to his wife if he resists the process. So he goes through the round of operations and preparations for his new life that seems like a mashup between gender reassignment and witness protection. He’s given an elaborate body makeover (shot by James Wong Howe using a fish-eye lens — this film may have been a box-office flop but it was influential on other cinematographers: for at least a decade virtually every film that depicted surgery did so through a fish-eye lens. So did a lot of movies depicting other subjects) and also has a new identity created for him as Antiochus “Tony” Wilson, painter and resident of the arts colony on Malibu Beach. When the bandages are cut off Hamilton’s face and body have been given so extensive a makeover he’s now played by a different actor, Rock Hudson (who as a Gay man in Hollywood all those years surely knew something about living a secret life!), who’s the only person billed above the title in the credits.
Frankenheimer originally had the plan that both Hamilton and Wilson would be played by the same actor — he first wanted Laurence Olivier but was told by the distributing studio, Paramount, that they didn’t consider him “bankable” (just as a decade earlier John Huston had been told by Warner Bros. they wouldn’t let him film Moby Dick with Olivier as Ahab, forcing him to settle for the far inferior and utterly miscast Gregory Peck). Frankenheimer’s next choice, Marlon Brando, turned him down (though ironically Brando would star in Frankenheimer’s only other science-fiction film, the third version of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau [1996]), so he approached Rock Hudson. Hudson agreed to sign for the film but then told Frankenheimer that the task of playing two characters of widely different ages and aspects was beyond his skills as an actor, so he asked the director if he could just play the character post-op. This caused several problems, including that Hudson was left-handed and John Randolph was right-handed — in the opening scene Randolph is shown working a crossword puzzle on a subway train and writing with his right hand, but later in the headquarters of the mystery corporation he signs the contract for “rebirth” with his left hand, and likewise when Hudson is shown painting he’s doing it with his left hand. Once Wilson is ensconced in his new digs in Malibu, he meets a girlfriend named Nora Marcus (Salome Jens) and falls into a new circle of friends — but he slowly realizes virtually all of them are on the mystery corporation’s payroll, and the ones who aren’t are as shallow in their own counter-cultural way as the people he used to know in his former existence as a suburban banker. The highlight, if it can be called that, of his new life is a wine festival in Santa Barbara which attracts a lot of hippie types and features people stomping grapes in a big wine vat … in the nude. Paramount’s censors went to town on this sequence, cutting the nude scenes and, according to Frankenheimer, making it look dirtier than it did in his cut (which is what we saw; it was restored to the film for a theatrical and DVD reissue in 1996), and he was able to get permission to film the ceremony on condition that the studio buy them a new vat to replace the well-worn one they’d been using. Wilson then gets drunk at a party after he realizes that most of his guests are “company men” (and women) in the same boat he is, and he contacts the company again and demands a second transformation, after which he will make his own way in the world again without their suffocating guidance.
Only [spoiler alert!] this time the mystery company’s surgeons aren’t going to “rebirth” him — they’re going to kill him because they need to supply replacement corpses for the clients whose “deaths” they fake as part of their process. Hudson’s character realizes this as they’re wheeling him into the operating theatre (and as the surgeon who did his original operations laments that it’s a pity they’re going to have to sacrifice him — “I really thought this one was going to work out”), which an imdb.com “Goofs” poster noted as a plot hole: not only would anyone going through a procedure like that be anesthetized first, the ending would actually be more terrifying if Rock Hudson went into the O.R. thinking he would be “reborn” again and we learned, from the surgeons’ dialogue, that he was really going to be killed while he was blessedly ignorant of that fact. Still, Seconds is a quite powerful movie, both an engaging “take” on an old legend and a film that makes some of the social commentary Frankenheimer was hoping it would — and it’s not surprising that this film has gained a cult following over the years. Frankenheimer also got more out of Rock Hudson than any director had since his eight-film series with Douglas Sirk ended with The Tarnished Angels (1957), and for the scene in which he gets drunk at the party Hudson really got drunk. And though Seconds is now available on DVD and hailed as at least a minor classic in the genre, for years the film was so obscure that the owners of a collectors’ video store in Hollywood once gave an interview to Turner Classic Movies in which they said that one day a customer came to their store and asked to rent their copy of Seconds. As part of their routine, they asked him for his I.D. and read the name on it: “John Frankenheimer.” The clerk checking him out said, “Wait a minute — you directed this movie, and you have to come to us to be able to see it?” — 7/14/19
