Criterion Collection Review #667: John Frankenheimer's 'Seconds' (1966)
It’s appropriate, and perhaps almost necessary, that John Frankenheimer’s “Seconds” is ultimately a very good film that’s dying to be great. The final chapter in Frankenheimer’s informal “Paranoia Trilogy,” (the other installments being “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Seven Days in May”), “Seconds” is the best and certainly the most enduringly resonant of the three, in part because it’s less of a political thriller than it is a resoundingly human one, less concerned with power than it is hope, regret and resignation.
A bleak reappraisal of The American Dream, “Seconds” unfolds like a bitter cocktail of “Mad Men” and David Fincher’s “The Game”, and the decades by which it anticipated those two reference works should be seen as a testament to how urgently unafraid Frankenheimer’s film was to tear away the gauze from the raw wounds that underlie our culture, the quiet fissures in our lives that western civilization perpetuates by promising to heal. While the lack of a strict caste system still allows America to proudly wear “The Land of Opportunity” as its moniker, the promise of social fluidity is far less appealingly motivational than the possibility, however remote, of complete reinvention. Starting over. A second chance. America isn’t about self-improvement, it’s about transfiguration – not about bettering yourself, but about becoming someone better.
Saul Bass’ hallucinatory opening credits sequence immediately informs us that this most ordinary man is fated for most extraordinary circumstances. On the day we meet him, a day like any other, he’s hustling across Grand Central Station towards the train that will take him home (train #2046, for those of you looking to entertain some far-fetched connections). Having spent my life between New York and Connecticut, I’ve seen Grand Central a thousand times over, but I’ve never seen it like this. In a sequence that seems to be the alpha and omega of Darren Aronofsky’s stylistic inspirations, legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe transforms the teeming commuter mecca into a dissonant beehive of paranoia, the camera – harnessed to the actors and staring at their faces through fisheye lenses – seeing every misstep in New York’s greatest masterpiece of human movement.
It’s a deliciously noir opening sequence, a mysterious man tailing our protagonist until the moment the target boards his train, at which point Arthur’s pursuer taps him on the shoulder and offers over a small piece of paper. The train doors close. A bewildered Arthur unfolds the note and finds a SoHo address scribbled inside. That evening, he receives a phone call imploring him to heed the note’s invitation. The call is from his old friend Charlie Evans, but Charlie Evans is dead.
Arthur is less a person than he is a richly detailed archetype. He’s the American salaryman of the 1960s, a dull creature with an ashen face who commutes from the New York City bank at which he works (fingers crossed for that promotion, Arthur!) to the model Scarsdale home in which he and his housewife sleep in separate beds. There’s genuine affection between them, obvious reservoirs of love that have been stunted by the inertia of the silent Sirkian crisis that unites the neighborhood in wordless despair, consumerism as much a catheter for their doldrums as it is for ours. Indeed, on the first and only night that we see Arthur and his wife together in their home, they engage in the same conversation that continues to recur throughout our cinema, bemoaning the conflation of life and products 33 years before Lester Burnham would insist that “this isn’t life, it’s just stuff!”, screaming at his wife as though the notion were a revelation and not a secret we all agree to share.
Sure enough, Arthur goes to the designated address the next morning, winding up in a butcher shop where he fits right in amongst the slabs of hanging meat. Cut to Arthur being offered a mysterious service by a vaguely sinister company, cut to Arthur undergoing extensive plastic surgery that makes him look like Rock Hudson (in the best and most heartbreakingly self-reflexive role of his career), cut to him beginning a new life on the beach as an established artist in California. It’s preposterous, but that’s the idea, Arthur finally finding a product that seems to actually do what every other product merely promises to, something that he can pay money for in exchange for a better life (though the financials of the whole situation are a bit wonky). It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that Arthur should be careful what he wishes for and all that, but what elevates “Seconds” from being an overlong “Twilight Zone” episode – and allows it to recover from the occasional clumsiness of its bacchanalian second act (which is alternately weird and wearisome) – is the courage the film evinces in its own convictions.
"Seconds" is comprised of three rather distinct chapters, but Frankenheimer's direction allows the film to unfold as a single coherent narrative, his compositions (almost) always rendering mid-60s America in a way that feels at once both honest and unnervingly suspicious. Howe's camera, whether gliding through meat racks or bumping into the slick chest of an orgiastically happy wine fetishist, allows the picture to maintain a blunt reality that's coming undone at the corners, like the back of a sticker that's irresistibly begun to peel. This tonal consistency allows “Seconds” to become one of the rare films that doesn’t hit a speed bump when it swaps actors in a main role, Frankenheimer's story – for all of its hectic cross-country action – always orbiting around the same idea: we are never more than our context.
When reborn, Arthur is an artist not because he has any great skill with a paintbrush, but because the people that populate his new life ostensibly believe that he’s an artist. His new existence isn’t undone because he struggles to connect with the hedonism of youth or because he learns that his exotic new fling is a hired hand – no, Arthur’s second act becomes an impossible fiction only because he becomes aware of how his fraudulence is reflected in the eyes of those around him. Arthur learns that he’s surrounded by complicity, nothing more than an old man in a new body. I think of the narration from “Fight Club” (every iteration of which was informed by Frankenheimer’s work), when our nameless protagonist encounters another person who fakes various cancers in order to bilk actual victims for their empathy. “Her lie reflected my lie. Suddenly, I felt nothing.”
THE TRANSFER: It's hardly a surprise that "Seconds" looks phenomenal on Criterion Blu-ray, but this is certainly one of Criterion's grainier transfers, unafraid to let some of James Wong Howe's most overexposed images be seen as they were shot. It's clear from the beautiful contrasts and remarkable clarity of the picture in the opening sequence (which is naturally lit by the ambient lights in Grand Central Station), that the film has been impeccably restored.
THE EXTRAS: An exclusive 14-minute video in which Alec Baldwin waxes poetic about "Seconds" may not be Criterion's finest hour, but I reluctantly admit that it's amusing to watch the movie star reflect on John Frankenheimer's disposition, his various ticks and inflections. The real highlight here is naturally Frankenheimer's commentary track. Recorded in 1997, the alternate audio finds the director both feisty and wonderfully candid. A big personality, Frankenheimer tirelessly lauds his cast and crew ("Rock Hudson was one of the kindest men I ever met"), talks about how many of the film's cast members were once blacklisted, details his choice of lenses, and explains why the shoot almost made him a vegetarian. The disc is rounded out with a selection of other interviews, clips from a 1965 television show about Rock Hudson, and a rather compelling visual essay by R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance. It's not an especially overstuffed edition, but you won't be hurting for context.
THE ARTWORK: The oblique cover illustration, drawn by Saul Bass himself, vividly speaks to the film's existential crisis, but I actually prefer the simpler variation that you'll find on the cover of the booklet inside. Either way, it's a keeper.
THE SCORE: 8.7 / 10
