- If you found The Manchurian Candidate to be just a little too sane and healthy for your tastes, then perhaps you will enjoy John Frankenheimer's Seconds. Dialing the disturbing paranoia up to maximum, Seconds relates the tragedy of Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), one of the unhappiest men you'll ever meet. Despite being a successful businessman, Arthur moves like a sleepwalker through his unrewarding personal life. The nicest thing he can say about his wife (Frances Reid) is that they never quarrel, and his now-grown daughter is absent from his life. When his old college chum Charlie (Murray Hamilton) phones him, Arthur has no choice but to respond. Particularly since Charlie died years ago.
- In the film's best sequence, Arthur shows up at the laundromat whose address was passed to him on a train. The proprietor gives him a second address corresponding to a meatpacking company. From there, Arthur is driven to the headquarters of "The Company," where the mysterious executive (and crispy chicken enthusiast!) Mr. Ruby (Jeff Corey) tries to sell Arthur on getting a second chance by being reborn into an entirely new body. Sensing his reluctance, Ruby quickly shifts to the hard sell by showing Arthur footage of the drug-induced sexual assault he just committed. And then the kindly old CEO (Will Geer) steps in to seal the deal. Go into surgery today looking like John Randolph and wake up tomorrow looking like Rock Hudson!
- Believe it or not, this is where things take a turn for the strange. Whatever connection to reality Arthur (now called Tony) and the film once had is quickly severed once he meets a strange woman named Nora (Salome Jens). First, Nora escorts him to a bohemian party that quickly erupts into a grape-smashing orgy. Maybe that sounds like fun in writing, but the movie makes the entire experience as off-putting as possible. Their next event is a much more traditional cocktail party in which the increasingly inebriated Tony starts rattling off facts about his former life. Between that and his uncomfortable visit to the wife who doesn't even recognize him, The Company soon realizes that Arthur/Tony isn't turning out to be the corporate success story they had hoped for. Fortunately, there's just one more little service he can perform for them...
- While I didn't much care for the second half of Seconds after things went completely off the rails, I admit to a grudging admiration for a film that consists almost entirely of discomforting shots. Frankenheimer and cinematographer James Wong Howe are absolutely merciless in subjecting the audience to intentional disorientation through angles taken over-the-shoulder, from foot level, and pointed at actors' faces in a manner that probably doesn't even have a name since nobody would ever film an actor that way on purpose. Sweat and stubble abound, and by the end Rock Hudson looks as bad as John Randolph ever did. I'm not sure I would ever want to rewatch Seconds, if only because the first viewing was traumatic enough that I'll never look at aging, crushed grapes, or crispy chicken the same way again.
- Also featuring Khigh Dhiegh, who plays essentially the same character he played in The Manchurian Candidate, and Richard Anderson from later seasons of Perry Mason (among other things).
