The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 2-8
Seconds (1966)
Directed by John Frankenheimer
Saul Bass’s opening-credit sequence establishes the thematic implications of Seconds’s sci-fi premise, with images of parts of the human face stretched in and out visually suggesting the elasticity of identity Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) experiences when he undergoes a daring operation that turns him into Antiochus Wilson (Rock Hudson). But it’s the psychological details that give Frankenheimer’s masterpiece its devastating power. Hamilton, bored with his current middle-class lifestyle, sees in the operation an opportunity to remake himself… but, under this film’s unsparing eye, the hippie artist lifestyle he tries out as Wilson—with its promise of liberation from American society’s preconceived notions of success—turns out to be no more fulfilling. The tragedy of Hamilton/Wilson is that he never had a dream of his own to begin with; by the time he realizes the necessity of self-reliance, he’s already been marked an irredeemable failure by the mysterious company that gave him this new body/identity. Perhaps it’s fitting that Hamilton is forced to walk through a slaughterhouse on his way to the company’s headquarters: he’s just one more slab of meat for the false promises of the American Dream. Kenji Fujishima (March 8 at Tenant416; contact venue for showtime and details)
