Seconds

The film features a surprisingly good performance by Rock Hudson, an impeccable supporting cast and stunning cinematography by screen veteran James Wong Howe.

This cult movie for the ages suggests a Twilight Zone episode taken to gruesome extremes. [09 May 1997, p.3D]

Frankenheimer’s 1966 riff on identity (and lack thereof) and corporate paranoia is one of his most unnerving, claustrophobic and entertaining efforts.

Seconds is certainly a flawed film, and it's easy to see why it flopped during its initial release: It's a relentlessly depressing, claustrophobic movie that offers no sense of catharsis whatsoever. Nevertheless, it's strangely touching, and as a portrayal of identity and alienation in suburban America, it's about a hundred times as creepy and sincere as David Lynch's thematically similar Lost Highway.

Saul Bass' unsettling title sequence sets the scene for the concise articulation of fifty-something bourgeois despair, as visualised by James Wong Howe's distorting camerawork and the edgy discord of Jerry Goldsmith's excoriating score.

Seconds has moments, and that's too bad, in a way. But for its soft and flabby midsection, it might have been one of the trimmest shockers of the year.

The screenplay (by Lewis John Carlino, of The Great Santini) collapses into musty moralizing in the second half, and director John Frankenheimer throws in the towel.