|
 For the ultimate de-programming scene of John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, a second-unit director made the mistake of filming all of Frank Sinatra's dialogue just slightly out of focus. Crushed--Sinatra, like Spencer Tracy, was a one-shot actor in that the first take was almost always his best--Sinatra and Frankenheimer tried without success to re-shoot the scene, deciding in the end to leave the blurred shots intact and hope for the best. Soon after the premiere, Frankenheimer was surprised to learn that critics and the public shared the belief that the out-of-focus shots were a brilliant move on his part, demonstrating the twisted point of view of a dazed protagonist. Though unintentional in The Manchurian Candidate, Frankenheimer may have gotten the seed of an idea from his serendipitous error.
The first thing that you'll notice about Seconds, the concluding film in John Frankenheimer's thematic "paranoia trilogy" (following The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May), is the amazing cinematography by legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe (Hud, Picnic). Starkly lit and dizzyingly shot (Howe once strapped on a pair of roller skates to film a boxing match, for 1947's Body and Soul), Seconds fulfills Frankenheimer's vision of a cinematic point-of-view that represents the distorted perspective of madness.
Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) realizes one day on the train that he's intensely dissatisfied with his life. Not unhappy, exactly, just not happy. He's cold and distant from his wife, his job has no meaning for him, and what once was a dream of security is now a banal nightmare of routine. One night, Arthur receives a telephone call from a dead friend who sets up a clandestine meeting with him for the following day. Still believing it to be a hoax but desperate for a break in his drudgery, Arthur agrees and is offered the chance by a mysterious organization to be killed and reborn in a different body with a different life.
How could one resist?
Portrayed after surgery by Rock Hudson (where do you get this operation, again?), Arthur is renamed "Tony" and submerged into a bohemian existence as a successful painter in an artist's colony--a vocation, we discover, that exhaustive psychological tests have revealed as Arthur/Tony's fantasy of utopia. He meets an exciting woman, Norma (Salome Jens), is accepted into a kinky social clique...and misses his old life like you wouldn't believe.
Smooth and always active, Howe's camerawork in Seconds is comprised of a series of nightmarish images utilizing the close-up in a way never used before by Frankenheimer, and features a series of extended tracking shots that produce a dreamy, delirious feel. In a way, the film is more Howe's than Frankenheimer's, with most of the director's visual hallmarks (wide angle, deep focus, forced perspective) subsumed by Howe's experimentation with long tracks (all the more impressive for the lack of a Steadicam), body-mounted POV shots (which Frankenheimer had inserted at one point in a hotel stairwell in 1964's The Train), and the newly-invented 9mm ('fish-eye') lens. A Bacchanal shot in broad daylight in the California hills is a claustrophobic sequence at one moment terrifying in a Wicker Man sort of way, and in the next disturbingly titillating.
The understanding that madness from a loss of identity is a thing that could be by turns frightening and exciting is the fuel that drives Seconds. Rock Hudson gives the performance of his career as a man finding himself in a new skin in the middle of his life--his inability to break free of the habits of his old life even in the face of a reality that is, by every count, favourable--is a heartbreaking one. As filmed by Howe, from Arthur/Tony's perspective, the strain of maintaining his legerdemain is crushing.
Frankenheimer's paranoia trilogy is like a Darwin chart of the evolution of the American Bogeyman: from the lone assassin of The Manchurian Candidate to the unreliable governmental agencies of Seven Days in May to the corrupt corporate avarice of Seconds. To say that Frankenheimer was ahead of his time thematically is to understate things. Seconds slowly reveals that the artist's colony (perhaps a nod to the distrust of the hippie culture of the late-'60s?) is populated entirely with identity-switched people, and that each time Arthur/Tony gets drunk and blurts out a detail about his former life (see, especially, a harrowing party scene), he comes closer to revealing their secret.
The crushing Orwellian omniscience of the corporate baddies in Seconds telescopes and crashes down around our ears in a stunning closing sequence as Arthur/Tony finds himself strapped to a gurney and rushed down a long hallway. It's one of the most harrowing sequences in any film from the sixties. Seconds is endlessly fascinating and clearly revolutionary. Where some of the technology of Seven Days in May was innovative at the time but is matter-of-fact today (the television projection screen, for instance), there are still techniques and ideas in Seconds that startle and discomfit thirty-five years after the fact. There is a lesson to be learned that amidst the technical trickery, the story remains linear and true, the performances strong and bright. In an age of hyper-edits and directors who don't know how to tell a story nor honour their actors, Seconds is something of a revelation.-Walter Chaw
|
dvd reviews: a to k | l to z | special categories
