Seconds

Identity fabricated and discarded like an expensive costume, but who remembers Thoreau's dictum about new clothes? The Saul Bass opening credits introduce a note of Hans Richter that quivers throughout, John Frankenheimer unclasps the malevolent camera (with consequences for Aronofsky) and zeroes in on one sad-sack amid the Grand Central Station swarm. The aging banker (John Randolph) sinks in muted anguish, married life has calcified into "a polite, celibate truce." The second chance he craves is available with a hush-hush conglomerate, a product even the voices of the dead call in to advertise. A meat factory ("The Used Cow Dealer") camouflages the actual flesh business, a twinkling Mephistopheles (Will Geer, straw boater-halo and all) eases the client into the acid bath. "So this is what happens to the dreams of youth." Off come the bandages, and the sagging protagonist discovers he's been shaped into none other than Rock Hudson. From suburbia to Bohemia, from the Manhattan hausfrau in her separate bed (Frances Reid) to the Malibu sensualist in her Dionysian whirl (Salome Jens), the sham painter unable to fill the sham canvases of his "own new dimension." Middle-class conformism and counterculture abandon as matching dead ends for the existential consumer, deformed equally by the bulge of the demonic lens. Eyes Without a Face for the surgery (there's a sharp cut from the pen about to touch the contract to the doctor's scalpel "writing" with blood), Siegel's pods for the cocktail-party revelation. The summit of Frankenheimer's Sixties unease, dreams of freedom laid bare as links in corporate chains—all pivoting on Hudson, a magnificently self-reflexive performance from a synthetic superstar who understood secret lives. ("My beard itches under my mask," says Vanished Man in Teshigahara's concurrent The Face of Another.) Cinematography by James Wong Howe. With Jeff Corey, Richard Anderson, Murray Hamilton, Karl Swenson, Khigh Dhiegh, Wesley Addy, and Joseph Campanella. In black and white.