Nightmare scenes from a surgery: flashes of a face from impossible angles. The sharp silver of the table, clean and cold. Close up shots on eyes, nose, skin—stretched, prodded, sliced. The garish lights of the operating room and the anonymous doctors and nurses below, masked and garbed in white, brandishing needles and knives.
It’s not a scene from a recent horror film. You’d be forgiven for assuming it was, given the omnipresent discourse around the horrors of aging and the resurgence of body horror films like The Substance (2024) to serve these dark times. Elderly reality TV stars get million-dollar facelifts, women in their 30s wear faces frozen in an ageless fever dream while platitudes on empowerment slip from pillowed lips, men get Botox and square their jaws with hammers, billionaires spend fortunes not on philanthropy but on throwing a middle finger up at death, and those of us who aren’t among the one percent settle for the uncanny sameness of Instagram face through filters and endless makeup routines and skincare products. The age-old ennui and unmooredness of middle age has now become something to pit a trillion dollar market against, to flee rather than fix.
In other words, had the 1966 film Seconds come out today, with its horror lens firmly trained on themes of extreme plastic surgery, dread of aging, and get-happy-quick schemes, it would likely have found a ready A24 audience and a series of Oscar nods. When it did come out in 1966, it should have been recognized as the obvious third in director John Frankenheimer’s paranoia trilogy, along with The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964), as well as a career high for star Rock Hudson.
But in 1966, audiences hated it. They hated the crossover of sci-fi, horror, and drama. They hated Rock Hudson in the lead, unused to seeing him play a lost soul instead of a smooth lover. They found the above-mentioned plastic surgery scene too disturbing and violent. They booed it at Cannes. A young Frankenheimer, coming off a string of critical and box office successes, was so demoralized that he didn’t attend the Cannes press conference.
The film follows 52-year-old bank executive Arthur Hamilton, played by an excellent John Randolph1, bored and depressed by his comfortable life and his marriage, his daughter living across the country with her husband. When Seconds starts, Arthur’s nightmare has already begun, too, and we’re dropped into it from the opening scene, as cinematographer James Wong Howe immediately telegraphs that we’re not in Kansas (or Connecticut) anymore. We get stretched and distorted shots, extreme closeups, fisheye lens shots, and organ music that orbs into a disorienting view of Grand Central Station. A massive crowd is in motion, boarding a train—all seems ordinary, but a current of menace ripples through every shot, every organ note.
We viewers stick to Hamilton like glue—Howe used a camera rig attached to Randolph and later to Hudson, giving us an almost sickeningly close and rigid perspective—as he receives a secret summons to a secret location, recommended in a secret phone call by his supposedly dead college friend, Charlie. He tries to ignore the summons at first, but as Hamilton proceeds through his alienated day, ending in a failed attempt at intimacy with his wife (in an incredibly poignant scene that shows what aging faces and bodies really look like in passion), he is persuaded that a visit to this location might be the only thing that saves him. Once there—a Byzantine building right out of Brazil (1985)—and given the opportunity to get extreme plastic surgery and a new identity, he tries to back out, but is blackmailed into accepting his new life (and faked death) for the low low cost of $30k.
Frankenheimer likes faces, and never more so than here, filling the frame with them: weird faces, old faces, hairy faces, creased and worn faces, faces in pain, all faces in close up—especially Hamilton’s. We are reminded that a visage is everything, while being told it can be remade, if you’re willing to pay the price. Frankenheimer uses funhouse mirror sets—including a long, Alice in Wonderland-like hallway leading to a nightmarish scene of assault—but also location shots that remind me of the dismal absurdism of films like Brazil or A Clockwork Orange, or some of David Lynch’s films. One location in particular, a slaughterhouse that advertises “used cows,” is perhaps too on-the-nose but also kind of delightfully weird. As we move through this world—ours but not quite ours—the faces and locations, including a real-life bacchanal, grow increasingly alien, reflecting Hamilton’s own inability to truly enjoy his new life in the body of painter Antiochus “Tony” Wilson, now played by Rock Hudson. The one bright spot is his new lover Nora, played by Salome Jens, who also has a fascinating face.
The plot is fed to us almost entirely through Hamilton’s discussions with both the mysterious Mr. Ruby (Jeff Corey), a top salesman in this secret company (who turns the art of eating chicken into something both hilarious and unholy), and the gentle but steely “Old Man” founder of the company, played by Will Geer in a performance that reminds me of Joe Turkel as Dr. Tyrell in Blade Runner (1982). (These comparisons highlight Seconds’ importance as a direct forerunner for many dystopian sci-fi films, despite its contemporary failure.) When alone, Arthur/Tony is just as dazed as we are, unable to process or make sense of his new life or create any real happiness in it. He has no control of his narrative at all.
But as it turns out, the characters have an ulterior motive for bringing in others to the company; in a brilliant bit of forward-theming, the whole thing is basically a pyramid scheme, where everyone’s trying to get more chances, more life, more seconds. This becomes apparent when Hamilton’s buddy Charlie (played with desperately anxious pathos by Murray Hamilton, whom you may recognize as America’s favorite mayor in Jaws), refuses to leave Arthur alone, claiming they’re tied together. And, of course, they are. Charlie has recruited Arthur, and Arthur’s eventual refusal of his new life is a big problem for Charlie, too. Arthur himself is told he must recruit a friend or colleague to the company—and while he doesn’t see the menace behind the mask, we do. After discovering that his new life is just an illusion—his new love, a company plant—he flees and tries to get back home, eventually asking the company for a new life altogether. But of course, in a startlingly grim ending, Arthur finds out what happens when you’ve asked for seconds too many times.
Rock Hudson’s performance in this film is a masterpiece—easily his deepest, most serious work. Hudson acts his face off, even to the point of fighting capture in the nightmare final scene to such an extent that football players had to play the medical attendants restraining him. His will to live in that scene is palpable and visceral, making the terror vivid and real for the audience. Hudson’s face dominates the second half of the film, and it is a face defined by loss, by sadness, and by disillusion.
But in 1966, art house audiences didn’t take Hudson seriously, and his own fans wanted to see him flirting with Doris Day in Pillow Talk, or sweeping Jane Wyman off her feet in Magnificent Obsession. They were unprepared for and uninterested in this version of Rock Hudson, who first appears on screen with a haunted expression and scars sprinkled across his face—a Frankenstein’s monster version of the actor, an uncertain man, handsome and rugged on the outside, flaccid and lost on the inside. He was determined, despite his image, to be vulnerable, insisting on getting plastered before performing a pivotal party scene where Hamilton-as-Wilson gets plastered and proceeds to spill the beans about his plastic surgery. Somehow, Hudson uses that handsome, square-jawed face to give us a bleak picture, a distorted, disconnected image, much like the paintings he is supposed to be making in his new life as an artist. His face is a mask of pain and alienation. Hudson himself felt it was his best, and was disappointed at the critical reception at the time.
Seconds isn’t only what I’d consider Frankenheimer’s best film because of his direction, or his vision, or even Hudson; it also owes a big debt to James Wong Howe’s cinematography. Howe, a popular and celebrated cinematographer in Hollywood, was an expert at the kind of paranoia-filled, shifting camerawork that refuses to recede and provide a stable ground for the viewer. (He also gave us the panic-driven, frenetic visual tone of 1957’s The Sweet Smell of Success.) Howe was a pioneer in the use of wide-angle lenses, and uses them very effectively here to help create this claustrophobic style2. He was rightly nominated for an Oscar for this film, the only Oscar nod it received.
Seconds had all the right ingredients: star power, star director, star cinematographer, startling and prescient themes. But it arrived too soon: too soon for audiences who would later come to love mixed genre films; too soon for filmgoers who would eventually come to celebrate an actor breaking out of their traditional type to do something darker; too soon for audiences who hadn’t quite rejected the post-war optimism of the 1950s, though it was on its way out. But it’s not too soon anymore, and Seconds has been given a second life since as a cult classic. As Frankenheimer noted, it was “the only movie I’ve made that’s gone from failure to classic without ever being a success.” But with the laserdisc release in 1997 that revived critical interest, it’s since found that audience, with a Criterion Collection edition that came out in 2013 and a new life in repertory art houses in the present day. It’s no longer too soon for a horror film about trying and failing to buy your way out of death.
The title Seconds does a lot of work here; time passes in the tick-tock of seconds, characters get second chances. But the slick thread of gluttony running throughout this film also calls up the image of diners at a banquet, heaping on seconds. It’s the same greedy idea our current strain of billionaires and celebrities has been infected with: maybe some people just deserve more youth. Trouble is, there are no seconds with youth, as Frankenheimer’s devastating film shows.
“I sure hoped you’d make it,” says a rueful founder to Arthur, near the end of the film. “Find your dream come true.”
And Arthur answers for the entire 21st century when he responds: “I guess I never had a dream.”
- Randolph had spent the past decade blacklisted in Hollywood for his union activity after being hauled before HUAC in 1955; Seconds was, ironically, his real second chance, his career comeback from exile.
- Howe was also subjected to a lifetime of racism in his personal life, sadly; although he came to the United States at 5 years old, he wasn’t allowed to become a citizen until he was 44, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed, and due to the “morals clause” in his contract, he wasn’t allowed to publicly acknowledge his marriage to white author Sanora Babb.