Seconds (1966)
Country: US
Technical: bw 106m
Director: John Frankenheimer
Cast: Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Will Geer, Jeff Corey, Richard Anderson, Murray Hamilton
Synopsis:
A jaded, aging banker is approached by an old friend, thought dead, with the mysterious promise of a fresh start in life. Before long he is twenty years younger with a new identity as an artist on Malibu beach. But adjustment does not come easily and application for reassignment has its price.
Review:
A chilling, boldly effective science-fiction tale, shot and performed by television professionals in the director's still vigorous, innovative style. Saul Bass's title sequence is a classic piece of upstaging cleverly dovetailed into the body of the film, and the close-up mise-en-scène ideally emphasises the physical malaise at the heart of the story. The moral, namely that to go against nature carries its own unpredictable psychological price, is not delivered didactically but sublimated in the dreadful series of dreams, disillusionments and the brutally shattered renewed hope of the protagonist. The bacchanale and the party scene that follows are perhaps misjudged in the sense of being over-prolonged, though they too generate their own discomfort in the viewer's consciousness; this is after all a vicarious exercise in self-indulgence and the joke is ultimately on us.
Country: US
Technical: bw 106m
Director: John Frankenheimer
Cast: Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Will Geer, Jeff Corey, Richard Anderson, Murray Hamilton
Synopsis:
A jaded, aging banker is approached by an old friend, thought dead, with the mysterious promise of a fresh start in life. Before long he is twenty years younger with a new identity as an artist on Malibu beach. But adjustment does not come easily and application for reassignment has its price.
Review:
A chilling, boldly effective science-fiction tale, shot and performed by television professionals in the director's still vigorous, innovative style. Saul Bass's title sequence is a classic piece of upstaging cleverly dovetailed into the body of the film, and the close-up mise-en-scène ideally emphasises the physical malaise at the heart of the story. The moral, namely that to go against nature carries its own unpredictable psychological price, is not delivered didactically but sublimated in the dreadful series of dreams, disillusionments and the brutally shattered renewed hope of the protagonist. The bacchanale and the party scene that follows are perhaps misjudged in the sense of being over-prolonged, though they too generate their own discomfort in the viewer's consciousness; this is after all a vicarious exercise in self-indulgence and the joke is ultimately on us.
Country: US
Technical: bw 106m
Director: John Frankenheimer
Cast: Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Will Geer, Jeff Corey, Richard Anderson, Murray Hamilton
Synopsis:
A jaded, aging banker is approached by an old friend, thought dead, with the mysterious promise of a fresh start in life. Before long he is twenty years younger with a new identity as an artist on Malibu beach. But adjustment does not come easily and application for reassignment has its price.
Review:
A chilling, boldly effective science-fiction tale, shot and performed by television professionals in the director's still vigorous, innovative style. Saul Bass's title sequence is a classic piece of upstaging cleverly dovetailed into the body of the film, and the close-up mise-en-scène ideally emphasises the physical malaise at the heart of the story. The moral, namely that to go against nature carries its own unpredictable psychological price, is not delivered didactically but sublimated in the dreadful series of dreams, disillusionments and the brutally shattered renewed hope of the protagonist. The bacchanale and the party scene that follows are perhaps misjudged in the sense of being over-prolonged, though they too generate their own discomfort in the viewer's consciousness; this is after all a vicarious exercise in self-indulgence and the joke is ultimately on us.