Seconds (Frankenheimer, 1966): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm
This is a Funeral Parade screening. Full details of the strand can be found here.
Time Out review:
Hemmed in by an arid marriage, paunchy
middle-aged banker John Randolph
grasps another chance at life when a secret organisation transforms him
into hunky Rock Hudson and gives him a new start as an artist in
Californian
beach-front bohemia. Freedom, however, turns out to be a rather daunting
prospect, and the struggle to fill the blank canvas comes to typify
Hudson's unease with his new existence. Saul Bass' unsettling title
sequence sets the scene for the concise articulation of fifty-something
bourgeois despair, as visualised by James Wong Howe's distorting
camerawork and the edgy discord of Jerry Goldsmith's excoriating score.
After that, the film's uptight view of the hang-loose West Coast feels
like a slightly forced argument, until Frankenheimer regroups and the
jaws of the narrative shut tight on one of the most chilling endings in
all American cinema. Little wonder it flopped at the time, only to be
cherished by a later generation, notably film-makers Siegel and McGehee
who drew extensively on its themes and visuals in their debut Suture.
(This downbeat sci-fi thriller completed Frankenheimer's loose
'paranoid' trilogy - earlier instalments being The Manchurian Candidate
and Seven Days in May).
Trever Johnston
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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