Seconds

Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966) Post "Star Wars," science fiction films have been pretty cookie-cutter—fleet-ships, a Hero with a Thousand Names, odd plasticized bi-ped creatures in supporting roles and quests that somehow or other usually get around to revenge. Even the "new" can become old hat.

Science Fiction used to be about concepts, and technology was just an aspect of futurism. For all the newly-conceptualized metal and plastic and wires and blinking lights, it is the organic that has to contend with the changes and evolution just can't keep up with the advancement of tools (especially when they're eventually turned into weapons). Who or what is being served? How does one adjust...if one adjusts? That's why to see Seconds is still a thrilling experience, as it calls to mind a feature-length, subtler "Twilight Zone" episode, that takes an idea and turns it around in its hand, exploring the angles...and the consequences.*

Bank executive Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is receiving mysterious phone-calls from someone who claims to be an old friend but doesn't sound like him. A note is slipped into his hand as he enters the subway, and upon further exploration (and prompting) learns that he is being offered a second chance in life. The anonymous corporation will transform him with plastic surgery (even replacing his finger-prints) and an exercise regimen, while setting up a planned "accident" with an unrecognizable "similar body-type" to explain his absence. To the world, he will die, but he'll be resurrected as a new man, with a new life, in a new community—everything re-arranged neatly and clinically. From the ashes of Arthur Hamilton will emerge Hamilton 2.0, Antiochus Wilson (Rock Hudson), bohemian painter. "Wilson" makes a go of his second chance, but he's still the man he used to be inside, and he struggles internally with his new choices...and the ones he left behind. Changing his mind becomes the greatest challenge.

Filmed in black and white—this film would have been over-powering and kinda ugly in color—by the master cinematographer James Wong Howe (with assistance by John A. Alonzo), Seconds is filmed in disorienting tight close-ups, and with unnerving wide-angle lenses that contort, bend and mold the right-angles of life into constricting prisons. The helter-skelter editing of David Newhouse and Ferris Webster keeps the viewer from becoming complacent, and Jerry Goldsmith's bizarre discomfiting score only adds to the unease. This is Hudson's best role—if you're like me and aren't into rom-com's—and his best movie. But it's contradictorily a one-sided performance—there's not an awful lot of joy (I think that may be the point), and he's unsure, disoriented or drunk throughout most of it. And, as Frankenheimer says in his commentary, he really worked hard in this role...especially towards the end.

One should also be aware that in one scene in the corporation's stark "briefing room," the cast is comprised of Randolph, Will Geer (he's especially creepy in this role, while being his most benevolent) and Jeff Corey—all "brethren" in the secret society of blacklisted actors.

This version of Seconds is not the one released in the States in 1966. A disorienting wine-making festival sequence with pre-hippie free-thinkers orgiastically stomping grapes in the buff was deemed too risque for its release (and Hudson wasn't comfortable with the sequence, as is evident in his performance), but it has been restored for the DVD release.

It's still an affecting film, even now, over 40 years later, a cautionary time-capsule of that era when the concerns of the speculative writer was society and not space-ships. Sometimes, fantasies have a nasty habit of becoming nightmares.

Saul Bass' disorienting Title Sequence gets you in the mood.

* Director Frankenheimer worked in the Golden Age of Live Television and worked with Rod Serling, pre-TZ, and post-TZ—Serling wrote the script for Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May.

Bend of the River

Bend of the River (Anthony Mann, 1952) "Any man can make a mistake." 

Take Glyn McLintock (James Stewart). He's scouting a trail for a wagon-train of farmers, led by Jeremy Baile (Jay C. Flippen) in the Northwest territories when he comes across an impromptu necktie-party and and on the end of the rope is Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy), the guest of dishonor. Maybe it's his own sense of honor and justice. Maybe it's the itch he feels in his neck. But he rescues Cole and finds that they're like two peas in a morally questionable pod: both men have reputations loud enough to follow them through the virginal Oregon territory. They think the same, completing each other's sentences, they fight the same, pulling each other's fat out of the fire many a time—the two of 'em together are deadly. But put 'em at odds—over a girl or a deal—and the results could be equally deadly if the modicum of good shared between the two doesn't delay the inevitable.

They're both likable bad men, looking for a good future away from civilization. It just depends how close their pasts follow them. Baile has his own ideas on the subject: "A man like that don't change." McLintock hopes he's wrong, but just in case, he's going to keep that kerchief around his neck tied tight. Daughters Laurie (Julie Adams) and Marjie (Lori Nelson) think that the right woman can change a man. Gambler Trey Wilson (Rock Hudson, very good in an early role) who's "fast on the draw, but soft" and "not the marrying kind," thinks that's long odds. But the time will come when the two men so evenly matched are going to have to choose sides. And when they do...

You see a lot of Howard Hawks' Red River in Bend of the River. That's because they share the same script and story-writer, Borden Chase. A lot of incidents and lines of dialogue reflect each other. Hawks joked his way out of Red River's volatile climax, but there's no chance of that here, even though both movies do share a heroine who gets hit, literally, with an arrow when they meet the man they're going to fall in love with. And where John Wayne found underplaying the line "One day you'll look back and I'll be there" most effective, James Stewart seethes it through his teeth. The Mann-Stewart Westerns had complicated psychologies with Stewart exploring his dark side in each of them (although not so much in their other collaborations in the '50's, The Glenn Miller Story and Strategic Air Command). Bend of the River is one of the best of them, with a vengeful Stewart picking off his enemies one by one, without a mind to the morality of an ambush.*

It is that razor's edge of sanity and judgement that makes Bend of the River interesting. At any time, one can imagine Stewart losing the veneer of good-guy and killing in hot blood or cold. It is that sense of real danger that Mann and Chase and Stewart bring to the conflict of being in a tight spot with no way out that makes Bend of the River one of the better Westerns ever made, and one that feels timeless in a genre considered past its time.

There's something you don't see every day: A cold-blooded Jimmy Stewart

* Oh, now here's a scary thought—the movie could play as a Westernized Rambo

Winchester '73

Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950) One in a thousand. That's how many perfect Winchester rifles were produced. One in a thousand so perfect of bore and rifling that a man using it need not compensate for anything except that thrown at him by God. Men would fight for one. Men would kill for one. And the Winchester '73 that Lin McAdam (James Stewart) wins in a marksman's contest probably ends up a little less than perfect as it goes from hand to hand, and is even used as a shield and a club in the long circuitous route of the movie. But, as the repeating rifle has become the difference between life and death in the heady days after Little Big-Horn, the Winchester is the weapon of advantage in skirmishes on the plains.

The first of five westerns Stewart made with Anthony Mann in the 1950's that deepened and darkened the Stewart persona from the "aw, shucks" townie to a complex, psychologically challenged character who could be pushed to undisciplined anarchy, Winchester '73 has more going on in it than most of the other Stewart-Mann films, which had more straight-forward story-telling through lines. This one is practically episodic, as McAdam and fellow-traveler "High-Spade" (the terrific Millard Mitchell*) start in Dodge City with run-ins with Wyatt Earp (Will Geer, before the blacklist got him), Bat Masterson and a stranger-in-town named Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally) before winning the perfect Winchester in a shooting match.

He doesn't have it for long as the stranger beats McAdam up and steals it from him. From there, it falls into the hands of an unscrupulous Indian trader (John McIntire), a Sioux warrior (Rock Hudson--you read that right), briefly in the hands of horse-soldiers Jay C. Flippen and Anthony—soon to be Tony—Curtis), then to an untrustworthy homesteader (Charles Drake) and finally, the possession of desperado Dan Duryea. Quite the cast (where's Harry Morgan?), and add in Shelley Winters as the saloon-girl trying to make good, and even if you didn't have Mann's steady hand with action, you'd have a movie full of good character parts.

Duryea is at his hipster best, playing an outlaw determined to out-laugh all of his opponents, McIntire is nicely droll as the Indian giver/trader, and Shelley Winters gives off an "I'll deal" vibe that endears you to her immediately. In one of the little authentic touches Mann inserts to show how rough the West really was, Winters nearly bounces off a buck-board dangerously careening through the desert, and when McAdam hesitates when giving her a gun to defend herself during a Native attack, she gives him a toothy grin and says, "I understand what the last one's for..." I want that girl on my side.

It is capped with a mountain shoot-out between old-antagonists-with-a-past McAdam and Brown that is a primer for any action director to clue an audience to the strategies and complications that a fight for advantage in the mountains can entail. Add to that Mann's experiments with light in landscape that were far outside and past the urban noir settings he had bathed in shadow and slivers of light in the post-war 40's.

But in the same year as Stewart and Delmer Daves dared make a western that showed the First Peoples' side of things (Broken Arrow), Mann and Stewart** (and Stewart and other directors) began a decade-long exploration of the cracks in Western civilization's veneer that showed the fragility of the individual—how, in a so-called "decent" society, there's only an angel's breath of morality distinguishing a maverick and a psychopath. Everyone can be pushed over the edge. And the only advantage is how many rounds you can fire off before the other guy feels the first one. The repeating fire-arm was the great leveler when it came to fighting. But it was also what prevented letting cooler heads prevail. Cooler heads don't have a chance against hot lead fired by a cold heart. It's how the West was taken...and still is. The chances of surviving it to build something decent?

Probably one in a thousand.

* Mitchell has a great stoved-in character face and a likable self-deprecating manner that are also on display in one of his other prominent movie roles-in Singin' in the Rain. He died in 1952.

** One of the joys of the current DVD version of Winchester '73 is a rare commentary track by the elderly Stewart who goes into detail about the filming and his working relationship with Mann and the other actors. It's done without the "Stewart persona"--he's just watching the film and answering questions--but at the end, you can't help but smile when he blurts "Ya know, I'm just really impressed with this laser-thing."

Ice Station Zebra

Ice Station Zebra (John Sturges, 1968) The movie that was (supposedly) the favorite movie of billionaire-aviation pioneer Howard Hughes—one that he would watch obsessively.

One can only wonder why. It is not exactly inspired entertainment, although somewhat competently directed by John Sturges (who was at his best with genuine location work, rather than with effects-heavy set-bound shows, such as this and Marooned).

It was also one of the last of the prestigious "roadshow" presentations, shot in "Super-Panavison-70" and featuring "Overture" music and an Intermission at the theater. After this one, the "roadshow" concept was abandoned, in order to squeeze in extra showings per night, sounding the death-knell-by-chopping-block for such ambitious projects as Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Richard Lester's originally conceived three-hour version of The Three Musketeers. But, beyond that, the film may be one of the dullest thrillers ever filmed. 

Ice Station Zebra has the same stolid air of other adaptations of Alistair MacLean adventure yarns (The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare). It's just not as adventurous, and the locations—studio-created—are claustrophobic and closed-in, as opposed to having any dramatic vistas or the intriguing foreign locales of other MacLean stories. Here, it's meeting rooms, a submarine and a burned out polar station on a floating ice flow. People don't get out much, and the whole film feels close and boxed-in (quite a trick in "Super-Panavision-70). 

Oh, there are intrigues—it wouldn't be a MacLean story if there wasn't one or two double-crosses thrown in—but they're fairly typical. The sub' has to have a debilitating leak, and as befitting a Cold War drama (the coldest!), there are dueling loyalties and the to-be-expected double-agent (but who?). It never rises from the slightly edgy to the exciting and is mostly cliché-ridden, especially when it comes to the "whodunnit" aspects.

It's a fairly good cast with not much to do except glower at each other, and top-liner Rock Hudson isn't at his best at that, and is ham-strung by the script (by MacLean, Douglas Hayes—he wrote Kitten with a Whip, after all—Harry Julian Fink, and W.R. Burnett, no slouches, any of them) from doing anything interesting, like humor. Patrick McGoohan has one interesting scene where he loses it, but mostly he's clipped and acerbic in hyper-"Danger-Man" mode.  Jim Brown matches him frown for frown—twin performances by actors playing characters hating each other—and Ernest Borgnine does a risible Russian accent. A lot of testosterone, mostly going to waste, in material which is stretched to the ice-breaking point.

Patrick McGoohan recreates my expression watching this movie.

Supposedly there's going to be a remake, so there's a lot of room for improvement.

Given that it's a submarine movie, shouldn't it be called an "Underture?"