Seconds. In Manhattan, a worn, stout suburban banker contemplates a horrible question. "What have you got now?" The questioner represents a mysterious organization specializing in "fresh starts" for tired businessmen. Sweating a bit, the banker (John Randolph) rather furtively reviews his list of assets. Wealth. Company presidency coming up. A boat, social friends, a Scarsdale colonial occupied by an anxious little wife who keeps the roses trimmed. Answers the businessman, with grinding despair: "I. . .I don't know."
It is the right answer, and he is as good as sold. What he buys is oblivion. Soon he is propped up in bed reading his own obituary. Having purchased a $30,000 first-class death (hotel fire) with a stand-in corpse from the organization's Cadaver Procurement Section, he has undergone plastic surgery and a light brainwash. When the medics start pulling the bandages off, the former middle-aged banker stares into a mirror. Who can it be, under those stitches and scar tissue? Would you believe Rock Hudson?
Thus far, this untidy thriller proceeds without a serious flaw. Working slowly into the nightmare realism of David Ely's novel, Director John Frankenheimer and Veteran Photographer James Wong Howe manage to give the most improbable doings a look of credible horror. Once Rock appears, though, the spell is shattered, and through no fault of his own. Instead of honestly exploring the ordeal of assuming a second identity, the script subsides for nearly an hour into conventional Hollywood fantasy.
Rock is bluntly told: "You've got what every middle-aged man in America would like to have—freedom, real freedom." The freedom of his new life might well make a man wonder whether he has recaptured his youth or simply been shanghaied back to the silly season. Taking up his assigned identity as an artist, Rock frets because he cannot paint. Beside the sea, he meets a strange young woman (Salome Jens) who has apparently found peace by abandoning her husband, two children and a wall oven. Together they attend a nudie bacchanal that ends with everyone trampling grapes in a large tub.
Oddly enough, Rock finds little happiness in Happenings, but he does develop a thirst. One drink leads to another, and the aftertaste leads him back to Scarsdale. Ultimately he learns that it takes more than a surgical retread to renew the inner man, which was perhaps obvious all along.
After juggling these philosophical nuggets, Director Frankenheimer almost saves the picture by the straightforward expedient of a human sacrifice. He plunges with almost palpable relief into the surreal terrors of organization headquarters and carefully builds toward the film's screaming-meemie climax, sparing nothing but an anesthetic. Seconds has moments, and that's too bad, in a way. But for its soft and flabby midsection, it might have been one of the trimmest shockers of the year.