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Dec 10, 2013pegasus71 rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
I would characterize SECONDS as a sort of B-sci-fi thriller. The best features of the film are some interesting opening credits created by Saul Bass, some unusual photography using dramatic angle shots by James Wong Howe and a good performance by John Randolph in the role of the Wall Street banker pre-transformation. But the story as a whole seemed pretty ridiculous and rather amateurish. Frankenheimer is supposedly satirizing the subservience of the individual to corporate power and slavery to money and materialism, but the movie seemed little more than soap opera melodrama. There is one long sequence where Tony Wilson (played by Rock Hudson) goes with a girl he meets on the beach to an orgy in the hills of Santa Barbara where everyone takes their clothes off and jumps in a vat of grapes to embrace each other and stomp around in some sort of Dionysian frenzy. The net effect however, seemed simply that of a film director’s self-indulgent and obsessive depiction of some sort of 60s “Hippy Moment.” It’s not surprising that the film never received the kind of recognition accorded the other two earlier films in his so-called "paranoia trilogy", THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and SEVEN DAYS IN MAY.