seconds (d. john frankenheimer, w. lewis john carlino, david ely)

Seconds has a bravura opening sequence. A distorted face in close up. Approximating the surreal. It triggers a lengthy sequence, the likes of which the algorithms would surely nix nowadays, as a suburban banker comes home to receive a call from a dead friend. This will eventually lead to the man’s death and subsequent reincarnation, as Rock Hudson, a socialite painter. It’s an out-there premise for an out-there movie. There are several scenes which could be straight out of The Substance. But Frankenheimer uses extended narrative beats to go further. A Bacchanalian Californian wine-pressing festival. A party that is reminiscent of Antonioni’s La Notte. There’s a Fellini-esque air to much of the action, underpinning the supernatural premise. Although it’s deliberately slow-paced, the director luxuriating in the extended sequences, there’s a relentless sense of madness which seems to inhabit Hudson, whose  woodenness makes the weirdness all the stranger, all the more off-beat. It’s far from a perfect film but it’s fascinating to see in this and Mickey One the kind of psychological complexity these sixties-era USA directors were reaching for, a complexity which got left by the wayside when Lucas and the marketing boys came to town.

manchurian candidate (w&d john frankenheimer, w. richard condon, george axelrod)

It had been a while since I visited my home from home. I had avoided the festival which took place during turismo altogether. I didn’t have the energy. I was travelling, I was rehearsing, I was too busy and the truth is that Cinemateca isn’t the same in the festival . Of course the festival has its charms, but I prefer Cinemateca without the hype. A screening of The Manchurian Candidate, the Monday after the festival, the night before I left for London, was ideal. Cinemateca was back to being half full, with familiar faces, the cinema tragics, como yo.

The Manchurian Candidate is a funny old film. Paranoia, war, humour and some crackerjack neo-HItchcockian dialogue between an oddly sympathetic, low status, Sinatra and a criminally underused Vivian Leigh, oozing screen charisma, even if her relationship with Sinatra’s Major Marco is completely superfluous to the plot. A film that came at the start of the sixties and predicted everything, from Kennedy to Trump, yet doesn’t seem to want to take itself nearly as seriously as those paranoid thrillers of the seventies, when the true extent of Frankenheimer’s Cassandran powers were revealed.

And now am sitting in Carrasco airport, looking out over the runway, where military planes share the space with a handful of passenger jets, and think about how in ’62, when the Manchurian Candidate was made, this view would have seemed equally mundane, with little intimation of the events which the film foreshadowed. Events which would destroy this tranquility and devastate whole generations.