I saw the film Seconds with my father at the Nile Theater in Minneapols when it was released in 1966. I remember being intrigued by it, but the emotions driving the protagonist were over my head. In retrospect, I see the film was too adult for me. I read the novel in paperback and enjoyed it as well, but it made no impression on me.
Now available on disc in the Criterion Collection and for rent on Amazon Prime, the film was a commercial dud. When it played on TCM earlier this month, I hadn’t seen it since 1966. What a movie. Although it has gained a following since then, the film seems to me a lost or unknown classic.
The film was directed by John Frankenheimer. It stars John Randolph as Arthur Hamilton and Rock Hudson as the reborn Arthur Hamilton under the name Antiochus “Tony” Wilson. Everyone in the cast is excellent. A good documentary about the making of the film is posted here on YouTube, but if there is any chance you might hunt the film down don’t watch the documentary until you have seen the film itself.
The story centers on Arthur Hamilton, a Princeton alum and successful bank executive who commutes by train to work in New York City from his home in Scarsdale. Hamilton’s Scarsdale is the suburbia of John Cheever’s Shady Hill and Bullet Park. Hamilton himslef is a character out of Cheever, bored with his marriage and vaguely unhappy. He seems to have a distant relationship with a married daughter.
A close college friend of Hamilton who was thought to be dead recruits Hamilton to attend a meeting with “the Company.” Hamilton thinks it over and attends the meeting. At the meeting he is presented with the opportunity of having his death staged by the Company. He is to be reconfigured unrecognizably in his own body. This for a price of $30,000 (about $300,000 today). Hamilton is persuaded to sign up.
The great James Wong Howe was the film’s cinematographer. You can see the influence of Gregg Toland and of the best film noir directors all over the look of the black-and-white film. If there is a subgenre of film noir for sci-fi, that’s where this belongs. To describe it as sci-fi ignores a crucial component of the film. I would say the ratio of film noir to sci-fi is something like 50-50. If you enjoy film noir, I think it is likely this film is for you.
Reborn as an artist, Tony Wilson is relocated to Malibu — another reason I missed the dynamics of the film the first time around. Malibu meant nothing to me.
It’s the 60’s. Tony meets a stunning young lady (Salome Jens) on the beach in Malibu and attends a bacchanalia with her. She may or may not be an employee or reborn “product” of the Company. The bacchanalian revelers undress and stomp grapes at the party. The scene reminded me of a friend who sent a short story to the New Yorker with the punch line “no mean feet.” (The New Yorker passed on it.)
In one scene toward the end of the film Tony Wilson visits Arthur Hamilton’s widow. She does not recognize Wilson as Hamilton reborn. Wilson presents himself as a friend of Hamilton who wants to learn more about him. She describes her marriage as “a polite, celibate truce.” She mentions Hamilton’s detachment — we had seen it when he returned from work to Scarsdale at the opening of the film — and adds that he had been dead for a long time before the accident in which he supposedly died. As I say, this is Cheever territory.
Arthur Hamilton/Tony Wilson has a yen for the ’60s dream of freedom. It works out about as well as the ’60s did. The film is gripping throughout. Make that gripping and chilling. The dreamy story has a nightmarish logic from the beginning to the ending I didn’t see coming.
