by Jason Sacks

Whatever happened to the dreams of youth?

Arthur Hamilton is a man in his fifties. He's bored and lonely, tied down to responsibilities and to people that he just doesn't care about. He's trapped in his own head, in his own existential middle aged angst, filled with a longing, aching, painful feeling that his life just hasn't gone the direction he wanted it to go.

Hamilton once was a tournament-winning tennis player who attended an Ivy League school. Hamilton once had dreams of making a living as a painter, someone free to express himself through his art and creativity. Instead Hamilton labors at suffocating job, as a bank manager who spends his days concerned about topics like debt-to-equity ratio.

Hamilton's family life is equally as suffocating. His only child, a daughter, has moved all the way to California fron New York. Though she's the pride of his life, Hamilton seldom talks to his daughter. And his relationship with wife Emily also suffocates Hamilton. Their life stultifying, dull, set into a set of grooves so deep it's impossible to see out of them.

So when Arthur is offered the chance to suddenly change his life, to literally experience life as a new person, he takes the chance to get a new face, fingerprints, and a completely new life courtesy of a mysterous corporation.

And, in the end, Arthur will learn that happiness does not come from the outside but from the inside.

Seconds is the new film directed by John Frankenheimer, whose work I loved in last year's 7 Days in May and the brilliant 1963 film The Manchurian Candidate. Like those two other great paranoid thrillers, Seconds delivers a nightmare vision of America that resonates with our current day, delivered in a steady pace that creates a world that both tempts and terrifies, and that shows a hyper-realized version of our everyday lives.

The move starts with a compelling title sequence. Created by the brilliant Saul Bass, the sequence focuses in on ultra close up images of a man's face. Seldom has an ordinary human body looked so strange in the movies, and this sequence sets up a profoundly upsetting stage for the film to follow.

After the credits, we get an equally strange and dislocating sequence at New York's Grand Central Station. The station is often shown as a cathedral or a simple transportation hub during films. But I can't remember an instance when the great civic landmark looked so upsetting and strange as Frankeinheimer and cinematographer James Wong Howe create a helter skelter impressionistic maze of ratlike passages below the station that tighten the sense of paranoia and confusion.

As he steps onto the train, Hamilton is handed a slip of paper by a man who quickly dashes off, a confusing encounter in a day of confusing events. Hamilton glances at the paper and sees the address written on it. Nothing else is given him, no information about what is at the address or why he should pay attention to it, but Hamilton is deeply troubled by the encounter. Hamilton's hands shake as he pulls out his newspaper, and his mind is too troubled to do his daily crossword puzzle.

As we find out, this strange event connects to another confusing experience that happened to Hamilton the night before. An old friend from his tennis playing days, long thought dead, called Hamilton to ask about his life. That night, the same friend calls Hamilton back. They confirm the friend's identity with a fact nobody else would know, and our protagonist finds himself deeply confused, in a state of existential doubt.

Arthur Hamilton's life has been radically changed these last two days. His previously deep groove is having its walls knocked down, and the resulting existential confusion terrifies Hamilton. He's in a cold sweat – a recurring element of this film – contemplating his life changing in unexpected ways.

When his wife Emily tries to comfort Arthur, even making a small romantic pass at him, Arthur turns away. He can't break out of his groove. He's too trapped in his own ennui, his persona of bland, bored placidity to change any aspect of his everyday life. The couple who dutifully give each other pecks on the cheek and who sleep in separate beds simply cannot change their lives. They are too trapped in their groove to imagine anything more.

Arthur is trapped in his own skin, tragic and pathetic in his inability to change.

How can anybody like that, living a life of deeply sad boredom, turn away from a chance to change himself? Hamilton has to go to the corporation – the cold sweat he feels the next day at work brings him there – and he turns away from his dull life in weathy Scarsdale and towards a new life, a mysterious life that will allow him a second chance to live out his youthful dreams.

Arthur Hamilton undergoes surgery and is reborn with a new name (Antiochus Wilson) and a new body, handsomer and younger looking. No longer is the distinguished-looking, 50-year-old  man played by John Randolph. Now he is played by the dashing Rock Hudson, matinee idol and icon for masculine confidence and charm.

The casting of Hudson in this role is a masterstroke. It's hard to imagine anyone better suited to play Antiochus Wilson than Hudson, and his performance in this film is a revelation. I'm used to seeing Hudson as the chamingly bland leading man in a series of Doris Day vehicles, but here he seems like a man caught between two worlds. He delivers a deeply passionate performance as a man caught between what he aspires to become and what he actually is.

That might best be displayed in the ambiguous relationship he has with the glorious actress Salome Jens, playing her character Nora Marcus like a divorcee set free from her own responsibities. She and Wilson quickly connect to each other, appropriate since their lives seem so parallel.

Their relationship comes to a head in a deeply strange and fascinating scene of a bacchanalian winemaking event the couple attend, in which the love of grapes causes all inhibitions to be cast off. It is in that moment that we begin to see Hudson's acting skills on full display, and see that his existential confusion hasn't disappeared because he's in a new body. No matter how much we can change our appearances, we will always be ourselves. That realization leads to several more thrilling twists and turns until we reach the deeply disturbing conclusion of this film.

By the time we reach the terrifying conclusion of Seconds, we can't help but to see ourselves in the split persona of Arthur Hamilton and Antiochus Wilson. No faceless corporation can ever truly free us from the person we are in our heads, and no mere physical changes can change us emotionally. People can't change unless they commit to actually changing themselves. No change wrought by outside forces or through physical change can stick.

We are all trapped inside our own minds.

And that might be the most frightening horror of all.

Four stars.

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