Seconds

1966 sci-fi drama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: An old guy who isn't exactly satisfied with his life gets a few calls from his dead friend and, on his suggestion, checks out the mysterious "Company," a company that promises to give folks a chance to die and start over again with a brand new life. It doesn't go very well.

I like my science fiction with a sense of paranoia and mystery, and this definitely has generous helpings of both of those. It all starts with the Saul Bass title sequences featuring distorted facial features with all this creepy organ dickery. John Frankenheimer's direction is almost claustrophobic, weird camera angles and lots of close-ups that give parts of this an expressionistic vibe, most notably during a trippy, Caligari-esque dream sequence. It's all wonderfully dark and teasingly mysterious, the sort of thing where you get little pieces of what you need to understand what's going on while knowing enough to figure out that this poor guy's getting himself into some trouble even before he walks into the laundry and meat-packing place. Interesting symbolic choices there, by the way, with that clothes press and the rows and rows of meat. John Randolph, as our protagonist, and especially Will Geer as an old guy who seems to be in charge of the whole outfit are really great in their roles. If the entire movie was as good as the first third, this would be on my list of favorite science fiction movies of all time.

Unfortunately, things aren't as consistently great post-operation. A lot of it is because Rock Hudson is just not very good in this movie, at least not until the very end during a scene which involves a lot of writhing. There's also a distracting Salome Jens playing Nora, the character's love interest in his new life. There's a too-long hippie win party with a lot of naked grape stomping, but the Rock-Hudson-adjusting-to-his-new-life parts of this movie just drag when compared with the exhilarating exposition and the dramatic finale. Don't get me wrong. This is still a terrific movie, probably even something you could call a sci-fi classic, but it doesn't make me like Rock Hudson very much at all.

An observation: Rock Hudson wasn't a very convincing on-screen kisser. I wonder why that is.