Seconds (1966, USA)

I first saw Seconds in college, while pillaging my roommate’s movie collection (also the way I got my hands on a copy of Pasolini’s Salo, but that’s something for another day). Not ever having been terribly interested in the genre films of the 1950’s and 60’s, didn’t know much about Rock Hudson’s life and career other than the usual gossip about how they ended. Seconds proved to be light-years away from frothy fare like Pillow Talk; a surprisingly avant-garde meditation on the nature of identity.

Seconds emerges directly out of the man’s world of 1950’s American life, when husbands toiled in city offices while wives engineered the suburban home front. As the film begins, our main character, “Wilson,” boards a commuter train home from Manhattan, and a stranger hands him a slip of paper that will change his life – quite literally. What this dour, middle-aged bank manager is offered is a chance for a full life transplant – not merely a fresh start, but a fresh face, body, and identity to go with it. He is surgically transformed into a virile, handsome figure, in the form of Hudson, and given a new life as a painter in a beachside community of Southern California.

Directed by John Frankenheimer, Seconds is stylistically (and thematically) linked to his classic The Manchurian Candidate, but there’s some Polanski here, too – the jarring and innovative cinematography by James Wong Howe recalls Repulsion, in particular. But Seconds investigates very American troubles in its evocation of the anxiety surrounding the myth of the self-made man, and the casting of the iconic Hudson as a character who has everything but true fulfillment was a stroke of genius.