Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Seconds

A successful banker with a boring wife living a monotonous suburban existence is recruited into a mandatory program where he will be reconfigured as an attractive, artistic type (Rock Hudson) and placed in a California coastal community with like people. John Frankenheimer's Seconds plays like an extended version of a Twilight Zone episode, never dull but still sterilized, shocking and hard to watch. It drives home its theme well though with a solid performance by Hudson who is himself surrounded by strong supporters, and is intriguingly filmed with great camerawork and use of closeup by James Wong Howe.
*** out of ****