Seconds
A stunning x-ray of center-elderly existential disaster, seconds is a darkish technological know-how-fiction fantasy of a person assuming a new identity thru regenerative surgery and obliteration of his antique existence, completed with the aid of the ominously shadowy agency. While ostensibly a mystery,
albeit one pulling fewer overtly political strings than frankenheimer’s the educate or seven days in might also, here the suspense is muted in desire of an nearly suffocating aura of melancholy, and the relevant everyman changeling is defined by using his silences—explicitly found through his spouse in a third-act monologue. The excursion de force of the movie’s starting act is pushed via the brilliant black-and-white cinematography of james wong howe, utilising fish-eye lenses, canted camera angles, and a ramification of manhattan locations and studio interiors that run the visual gamut from documentary-like spontaneity to claustrophobic and agoraphobic results, evoking the trial and the work of orson welles in wellknown. With its strings-oriented, every now and then bushy rating through jerry goldsmith and necessarily bleak, cautionary finishing, frankenheimer’s movie has been truly lazily, however now not baselessly, as compared to a glistening characteristic version of the twilight sector, with that series’s significant humanist streak most obtrusive in tony wilson’s (rock hudson) unauthorized visit to his “widow” and previous domestic.