Seconds.

Just as the post-Mommie Dearest perception of Joan Crawford turns her films into metaphorical minstrel shows, common knowledge about Rock Hudson's life and death can't help but transform his movies into mini-extravaganzas of subconscious self-revelation. It doesn't take a card-carrying Jungian or multiple screenings of Rock Hudson's Home Movies to reveal that the late screen actor's most interesting films flirt shamelessly with the subject of double identity--the perfect metaphor to describe Hollywood's ultimate masked man, the closeted gay movie star.

It's noteworthy that in Hudson's successful string of '60s romantic comedies, he frequently plays a lothario who pretends to be someone he's not. But the Kafka-esque joyride on which the Hudson persona is taken in John Frankenheimer's 1966 film Seconds is almost too on the money. Now available for the first time on video, Seconds is the story of 50-ish banker Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), who, choking on the emptiness of middle age, signs up with a secret organization that promises him a second chance. For a huge fee the company fakes his death, alters his appearance with plastic surgery, and supplies him with a new identity, a new profession, a new place to live, a new life.

It's nearly 40 minutes into the movie when Randolph's bandages are removed, revealing a dazed Rock Hudson. Transformed into a moneyed Malibu artist named Tony Wilson, the banker (now played by Hudson) struggles to make his new life more meaningful than the old one. But underneath his impressive new facade still beats a conservative, uncertain heart. At a hippie-style Santa Barbara wine festival, he can't even bring himself to tear off his clothing and jump into the vat with his fellow revelers. When Tony suffers an inevitable personality implosion and is recalled by the company like a design-flawed Toyota, he has the misfortune of discovering where the organization gets the corpses it substitutes for its new clients.

Although Frankenheimer's ham-handed directorial approach makes Seconds resemble a feature-length first cousin of an old Twilight Zone episode, the movie is nonetheless worth seeing for the black-and-white cameraman and the surrealistic, fun-house-mirror distortions of master cinematographer James Wong Howe, who won an Academy Award for Hud; Jerry Goldsmith's evocatively queasy score; and a screenful of anxiety-ridden supporting performances.

Hudson won the best reviews of his career for his utterly convincing portrayal of a stolid, confused, passive character who, unable to let himself go enough to get a handle on his identity, is forced into a confrontation with the void. Those who wish to interpret Seconds as the story of a gay man doomed by his inability to come out are more than free to do so.