The final chapter of director John Frankenheimer’s paranoia trilogy (afterTHE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE 1962 and SEVEN DAYS IN MAY 1964), SECONDS posits the possibility of a second chance to start one’s life with a clean slate, through proper plastic surgeries and a fake death, and our protagonist is a 51-year-old bank manager Arthur Hamilton (Randolph, cogently laying bare his ambivalence concerning the wacky proposition), who is consequentially, reborn as Tony Wilson (Hudson), assumes his hobbyhorse as an amateur painter, lives in his seaside studio and falls in with new female acquaintance. But soon his past catches up with him, because needless to say, plastic surgeries can only offer a new physiognomy and there is the conspicuous loophole in the undertaking if a reborn's previous memory wouldn’t be obliterated, the promised new life would very probably ends up like Fata Morgana.
With the missing link of amnesia, the story doesn’t live up to the scrutiny of its intrinsic logic, for one thing, there is no clear justification of why Tony insists on taking another new identity in the third act, it is not the mutable outlook which hinders a reborn's fresh start, but some ingrain factors that cannot be modulated by surgeries, which renders Tony’s desperate action arbitrary and its consequence moot. Also, the story heedfully skirts around the process of rejuvenation, Hudson is a decade younger than Randolph, so what special regiment does Arthur must undergo in order to attain the corporeal sea change (no liposuction is mentioned)? We would never know.
Above-mentioned gripes aside, SECONDS is commendable even it is solely for the avant-garde monochromatic cinematography from Hollywood doyen James Wong Howe (justly accorded with an Oscar nomination even the film was tanked upon its release), his camera angles are often oddly askew and heightened close-ups are put into extensive use in conveying through a distorted point-of-view that something is terribly amiss, underpinned by Jerry Goldsmith’s mind-bending incidental music, together they constitute a sterling oracular-and-aural combo to stagger the audiencewitless.
Rock Hudson, mining his own faculty in a genre he rarely sinks his teeth into, stoutly brings about a sympathetic commitment to the downward spiral of Tony’s mental agony on top of the tall-tale’s ineffectual effort to purport its legitimacy, and a grace note is the sign-of-the-times grape-stomping hippie frolic when Tony whiles away time with Nora Marcus (a mettlesome Salome Jens) in his ephemeral embrace of euphoria, which only to be dashed a moment later, to ascertain that living the life of Riley has its insurmountable underside, a mythos forcibly culminated in its preposterous finale (a lingering question is why Tony cannot just decamp and live somewhere else afresh?), for what it is worth, SECONDS is erring on the side of its cautionary-tale tantalization to mire its protagonist in the venal corporationwhereas ostensibly astute alternatives are conveniently on tap elsewhere.
referential points: Frankenheimer’s THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962, 7.8/10); Delmer Daves’ DARK PASSAGE (1947, 6.7/10); Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s SUTURE (1993, 6.9/10); Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960, 7.6/10).
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