Clearclassics: SECONDS (1966).

(This blog will nearly always be about books, but because a thread running through it is discussion of books that have been forgotten or sidelined, or somehow (I contend) misunderstood, I will occasionally discuss films or TV series that I feel have been unjustly neglected. This film fits into that category. I first saw it on TV in the 1980s and for years and years I couldn’t find it, or references to it, anywhere, in books about the greatest films of all time, in video or DVD shops, even quirky, ‘arty’ ones in Dublin. Finally my nephew, who studied film, lent me a DVD of it and I watched it again, after nearly 40 years.)

SECONDS directed by John Frankenheimer, starring Rock Hudson, Will Geer and others. (Paramount Pictures 1966). Masters of Cinema series DVD

The first time I saw this film was late at night on one of the British TV channels, in the late 1980s. I found it so terrifying and disturbing that I had to sleep with the light on. Shot in black and white, it has strange camera angles and that weird, jerky music you often find in early 1960s films about mental illness or murder. (Jerry Goldsmith wrote the score). Arthur Hamilton, a Harvard graduate and wealthy bank executive, in his 50s, travels from New York city to his home in Scarsdale, an affluent suburb, every evening: his wife Emily picks him up at the station, kisses him and asks him about his day. But on this particular day, Arthur has had a piece of paper with an address on it (34 Lafayette Street) pressed into his hand by a stranger on the platform as he boarded his train. This is following on from a phone-call he received the previous night from an old college friend, Charlie, who had died sometime previously. But Charlie isn’t dead at all, he is in a new life, and he wants Arthur to have a new life too. All Arthur has to do is to go to this address, and everything will follow on from that. Arthur, although with misgivings, takes him up on this offer, his death is faked and he is operated on quite comprehensively to change his appearance and his voice and his fingerprints and everything, and he is ‘reborn’ as Antiochus Wilson, an artist with a documented past and diplomas. (He pays through the nose for all this of course, and there is still enough money left over not to beggar his ‘widow’.) Off he goes (now with Rock Hudson’s good looks) to his new life, in a beach house with a studio in Malibu with a discreet servant called John who helps him get ‘settled’ in. Guess what – it doesn’t work out so well. And the ending (no spoilers) is suitably awful, but very artistically satisfactory.

Some of the horror of the film lies in the apparently normal settings where the action plays out – the suite of offices where the re-birthing ‘company’ is located has an ante-room where men in suits sit at desks reading or playing patience, there are rounded corners on the corridor walls and there is a book-lined study where everything is explained to Arthur. The boss and visionary behind the project is a sweet old elderly gentleman with a white hat (Will Geer, before he became Grandaddy Walton some years later) who reassures Arthur that he deserves a new beginning; he has earned it. That new beginning is in a California where the sun never seems to shine, although the cut-price Bond girl he meets by chance on the beach (all teeth and hair) seems promising. They go off to a very strange bacchanalian revelry full of hippies getting it on, and somehow that’s all creepy too, as is the party in Wilson’s flat where he gets drunk and almost gives the game away.

The first time I saw this film I was in my late 20s and then, Arthur’s middle-aged stasis seemed horrifying to me too – imagine having a boring job, and a predictable daily commute, and a spouse you didn’t fancy any more? Though even then I recognised the impossibility of what was being attempted by and for Arthur, I didn’t think his ‘pre’ life had any value at all. Watching this film in my 60s I found Arthur’s selfishness to be one of the most disturbing aspects of the film. Emily still makes the effort with her appearance and seems like a caring partner, his daughter is married but he can’t be conventionally happy about that, complaining about his son-in-law not being ambitious enough, he is curt with his secretary at work and impatient with the steam-pressers in Lafayette St and the people in the other locale to which he is directed – (meat wholesalers with animal cadavers sliding on hooks – very prescient), but he quickly minds his manners when he meets men in suits, in the offices. When he hears his death is going to be faked, he shows no concern for the unfortunate stand-in for ‘his’ corpse. When, in his new persona, he goes back to visit his wife (she doesn’t recognise him of course) he isn’t interested in how she is, he is only interested in how she remembers him. This is where I missed one of the morals of the film the first time out. No ‘rebirth’ could possibly work for such a dreadfully limited man. When he finally meets Charlie, his old friend, who is also a failed rebirth and also waiting for his ‘second chance’, it is hard to feel sorry for either of them, though Charlie’s short performance (Murray Hamilton, later the mayor of Amity in Jaws) is so brilliant we wish we could see more of him. Is Charlie crying with joy or despair? Does he even know himself?

All the reborns are men because middle-aged women, of course, never feel trapped, never have dreams they didn’t fulfil, and are all gloriously happy and contented, as we all know. Seconds appeared three years after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique drew attention to the problem of white American middle-class women who married young sinking all their efforts and ambitions into families who grew up and left them with nothing to do. If anyone was experiencing middle-aged angst, it should have been Emily, not Arthur. I suppose it’s a bit much to expect gender awareness from John Frankenheimer, whose other films show him to have been stuck in that Philip Wylie view of wives and mothers as somewhere between millstones and monsters – think of Angela Lansbury’s character in The Manchurian Candidate. But the (otherwise very good) critical commentaries accompanying the DVD my nephew lent me, by David Cairns and Mike Sutton, should have at least nodded to this, and they didn’t. That said, the film doesn’t shrink from showing us how untroubled Emily is by Arthur’s death, and her redesign of the house which makes a bright walk-through space of the dark study where he received the fatal phone-call from Charlie, made this viewer want to cheer.

All in all, this is a brilliant movie, but be careful when and where you watch it.

(Seconds is based on a book of the same name by David Ely (1963) which I came across in a charity shop and read, in those years when I couldn’t find the film; it is quite good and the film is faithful to it. The main character is a bit more sympathetic in the book, but not much.)