Blu-ray review: Seconds

Starring: Rock Hudson, Salome Jens
Director: John Frankenheimer

Seconds views very much like a companion piece to The Manchurian Candidate. One offers a nightmare vision of American public life, the other paints a picture of the American psyche cracking up – Kafka meets Freud meets The Twilight Zone.

Based on a novel by David Ely, it tells of an ageing banker who avails himself of the services of a shadowy corporation offering a fake death, rejuvenating plastic surgery and a fresh identity. Emerging from the bandages as ruggedly handsome Rock Hudson, he starts a new life as a painter in Malibu, acquires a tea-leaf reading girlfriend and hangs out with proto-hippies in Santa Barbara (one of the film’s set-pieces is an orgiastic wine-pressing ceremony, complete with daring full frontal nudity). But he brings his old neuroses with him and is soon pickling his new body in alcohol.

As a gay man who made a living playing heterosexual heartthrobs, Hudson must have known a thing or two about false identities, and this shows in the intensity of his performance. Likewise, cinematographer James Wong Howe shoots the film like a man possessed, employing a myriad of eerie techniques such as mounting a camera on Hudson with a harness to give the impression that the world is moving giddily around him (an effect Scorsese was to borrow for Mean Streets).

The screenplay by Lewis John Carlino has nagging flaws – the opening section is disproportionately long, while Hudson’s fall seems a bit too precipitous – but Seconds is a fascinating film which tightens its grip on you the more you think about it. It’s packed with unforgettable images (that first glimpse of Hudson, his new face covered in stitches), the supporting cast are razor sharp (Murray Hamilton is blisteringly good in a brief cameo as another of the “reborns”), there are some decent twists in the home stretch and the ending is absolutely chilling. Don’t wait until your next life to pick up a copy. 8/10

TRANSFER
A very nice transfer, with a little grain (as you would expect) in some of the set-ups that use available light, but otherwise very crisp, with detailed skin tones, dramatic high-key shots and a sparkling, windblown quality to the beach scenes. Upon its original release, the wine-pressing scene was shown only in a cut form, but here it is restored. 8/10

EXTRAS
Very lively, enjoyable 20 min interview with Kim Newman, who talks persuasively about the film’s merits and surprisingly widespread influence. ~ Excellent audio commentary with John Frankenheimer, crammed with info. He pays tribute to James Wong Howe’s contribution, describes shooting what was a real-life nudist wine festival (Frankenheimer ended up in the vat with his trunks round his ankles) and reveals that Hudson’s Malibu beach home in the movie was actually the director’s own house. 8/10

Blu-ray review: The Train

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau
Director: John Frankenheimer

With its Gallic setting and gritty black and white cinematography, this WWII actioner from John (The Manchurian Candidate) Frankenheimer seems to consciously evoke the look and mood of 1930s French poetic realism. The war is nearly over, Paris is about to fall to the Allies, and an art-loving German colonel (Paul Scofield) decides to escape back to Berlin by train with a collection of priceless modern art. Burt Lancaster takes on the Jean Gabin roll as the reluctant blue collar hero who sets about ingeniously delaying the train until the Allies can arrive to intercept it, while struggling to keep his fellow resistance comrades alive until the end of hostilities.

While the script by Franklin Coen and Frank Davis (based on a true story) has cynical and probing things to say about the cost of war and the vanity of human wishes, the camerawork by Jean Tournier and Walter Wottitz finds a grimy beauty in the scenes of the noisy railway yard and the soot-blackened faces of the people who work there. Frankenheimer directs with great energy and flamboyance, telling the story through complex, flowing set-ups involving multiple extras. It’s almost all shot on location – no back projections during the action scenes on board the locomotive – and there are small roles for French national treasures Michel Simon and Jeanne Moreau for added authenticity.

The film has its problematic elements – a one-note performance from Scofield, bad dubbing for Simon – but the pluses include a strong performance from an ageing, convincingly world-weary Lancaster as the man with the glory of France on his shoulders, spectacular set-pieces (a spitfire attack, trains crashing into each other), and an array of rolling stock which is sure to impress locomotive buffs. 8/10

TRANSFER
The HD transfer has a slightly grainy texture at times, but on the whole the brilliant early ’60s deep focus camerawork comes up with the inky richness of a Dore etching. Details of uniforms are crisp, there’s a giddy sense of motion as the camera swoops. Michel Simon’s face looks impressively lined and craggy in the scene where he’s grumbling in the station cafe, and a later scene where the train takes cover from an aerial attack inside a tunnel is a symphony of glistening blacks. 8/10

EXTRAS
36-min piece with biographer Kate Buford, who makes illuminating comments about Lancaster’s career in the ’60s, when he was past his heyday but still making heavyweight, worthwhile projects, albeit with diminishing commercial returns. Among the topics she touches upon are his problems on The Leopard with Visconti, who described him as a “cowboy”. ~ Contemporary 7-min behind the scenes piece for French TV shot at small village which is one of the film’s primary locations, containing interviews with excited and bemused locals. ~ 3-min interview for French telly about the French cast of the movie, which includes a nice clip of Lancaster dubbed into French. ~ Audio commentary with John Frankenheimer – not exactly chatty, but he makes some interesting points. 7/10

Blu-ray review: The Manchurian Candidate

 

Starring: Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey
Director: John Frankenheimer

Over half a century on, it’s hard now to grasp just how uncannily prophetic and tuned into the American zeitgeist The Manchurian Candidate was. Released in 1962, when the McCarthy era was still a recent memory, this tale of returning Korean vets caught up in a communist brainwashing conspiracy fearlessly mocked ’50s reds-under-the-bed paranoia, while at the same time ushering in a decade rocked by the high-profile assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

But even if a full appreciation of its historical impact now calls for a leap of the imagination, the film is still a dazzling piece of work and much more than just a superior techno-thriller. Director John Frankenheimer shows a flawless mastery of tone, binding together the disparate elements of the story – the Twilight Zone science fiction of the amphitheatre where the captured US soldiers are conditioned, the broad political satire of the scenes involving the oafish but nasty Senator Iselin, the Oedipal psychology of the hapless Sergeant Shaw’s relationship with his domineering mother – so that by the end it has a tragic power. The message, of course, is that so long as there are people like the Iselins in Washington, there’s no need for a communist conspiracy to screw up the country, Angela Lansbury is brilliant as the mother, but there’s also a career high performance from Frank Sinatra as Shaw’s commanding officer, who starts coming apart as the seams as he is plagued by surreal nightmares – his long scene on the train with Janet Leigh is probably the best thing he ever did in front of the camera. (And if that doesn’t impress, he also shows his more energetic side in a karate fight with Henry Silva.)
9/10

TRANSFER
The transfer is a little coarse-grained at times, but the b/w cinematography has an inky depth, and most of the key set-pieces – Shaw’s brass band reception in Washington, the unruly press conference, Senator Iselin’s grotesque costume party – have an almost stifling detail and immediacy.
7/10

EXTRAS
There’s a 58-min documentary about the director, including a welcome focus on his early days in live television. A good raconteur, Frankenheimer talks interestingly about films such as Birdman of Alcatraz, in which they had to tape bird food to Burt Lancaster’s fingers (“there’s no such thing as a trained bird, only a hungry bird”), although a slight mood of bathos sets in as the story moves onto his less distinguished later work. In a 13-min piece, William Friedkin enthuses about The Manchurian Candidate and talks about how Sinatra hated to do more than one take. Meanwhile, in a 7-min featurette, Frankenheimer, Sinatra and screenwriter George Axelrod reunite around a giant potted plant 26 years after the event; not much emerges, but we learn that the dream sequence took seven days to shoot. There’s also a very clear and informative audio commentary by Frankenheimer, in which he mentions his use of 18mm wide angle lenses and live locations, and goes into detail about the technical complexities of various set-ups, such as the 360 degree pan in the dream sequence. Along the way, it’s revealed that the Iselins’ private aeroplane in fact belonged to Sinatra, and that the long speech about hydrangeas was taken from a seed catalogue.
8/10