Seconds

Arthur Hamilton, a middle-aged banker, has a life that looks perfect and is entirely empty. One day a friend who is supposed to be dead telephones him and points him toward an outfit called the Company. What it offers is simple: a faked death, a new face on an operating table, a new name and a life from scratch. Arthur becomes Tony Wilson, a painter living in Malibu. The trouble is that the only thing that changed was his face. John Frankenheimer directed. Rock Hudson plays Tony Wilson. The cinematographer James Wong Howe worked in black and white and used an unusual method, lighting the whole set at once rather than building separate setups for close-ups and wide shots. He was nominated for an Academy Award for it. The Cannes screening ended in disaster, with the auditorium booing. The box office matched it: 1.75 million dollars against a 2.5 million budget. The original 107-minute cut only reached a wide American audience with the re-release in 1997. The verdict reversed later. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 79 percent. Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho both name it among their favourites. It entered the National Film Registry in 2015. Who it is for: viewers who like the paranoid American cinema of the sixties and thrillers built on identity. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a comfortable ending. The last ten minutes are deliberately unbearable and the film leaves no way out.