Seconds

Seconds casts John Randolph as Arthur Hamilton, a wealthy yet bored middle-aged businessman who reluctantly agrees to undergo a procedure that will completely alter his appearance – with the film’s latter half following Arthur, now Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), as he attempts to adjust to his new life. There’s little doubt that Seconds fares best in its promisingly eerie opening half hour, as the film, in its early stages, boasts an off-kilter visual sensibility that proves a striking complement to Lewis John Carlino’s spare screenplay – with the almost total lack of context playing an instrumental role in perpetuating (and heightening) the movie’s irresistibly creepy atmosphere. It’s only as things are slowly-but-surely explained that Seconds begins to morph into a progressively tedious piece of work, with the impossible-to-swallow nature of the movie’s absurd premise exacerbated by a deliberately paced and unreasonably uneventful midsection – as filmmaker John Frankenheimer places an all-too-consistent emphasis on Tony’s aggressively pointless exploits (eg he attends a weird outdoor orgy, he hosts a dull cocktail party, etc, etc). It is, as such, virtually impossible to sympathize with Tony’s increasingly perilous situation, which does ensure that the twist ending, as brutal and memorable as it may be, simply isn’t able to pack the visceral gut-punch that Frankenheimer has clearly intended. It’s finally impossible to label Seconds as anything more than a second-rate Twilight Zone episode, with the unreasonably protracted running time the tip of the iceberg in terms of its many, many deficiencies.

** out of ****