Seconds

Seconds

Release Date

1966

Director

  • John Frankenheimer

Cast

  • Rock Hudson
  • John Randolph
  • Salome Jens

Banker Arthur Hamilton hires a company that gives the wealthy and dissatisfied new faces and lives to place him into a new existence as Tony Wilson, an artist who lives in Malibu. Given a manservant to help him adjust, he soon finds that adjusting will be the least of his worries.

Rock Hudson is a revelation in this sinister, science-fiction-inflected dispatch from the fractured 1960s. Seconds, directed by John Frankenheimer, concerns a middle-aged banker who, dissatisfied with his suburban existence, elects to undergo a strange and elaborate procedure that will grant him a new life. Starting over in America, however, is not as easy as it sounds. This paranoiac symphony of canted camera angles (courtesy of famed cinematographer James Wong Howe), fragmented editing, and layered sound design is a remarkably risk-taking Hollywood film that ranks high on the list of its legendary director’s achievements. (Criterion Collection)


Past Programs

2018

Starting over in America

Museum of the Moving Image, New York, NY