In 1964, the Japanese studio Shochiku finished a 96-minute black-and-white yakuza film and held it for nine months because they thought it was too nihilistic to release. In 1966, John Frankenheimer's third film of the decade premiered at Cannes to a cold, scattered reception and went home a commercial failure. The American trade press treated it as a misstep from a director who, three years earlier, had made *The Manchurian Candidate*.

The films are "Pale Flower" and “Seconds”. Two years separate them. Two cinematic cultures, two languages, two industrial systems.

Both films are about a middle-aged man who has the surface of a life and no interior.

Muraki, in “Pale Flower”, comes home from three years in prison for a contract killing. Tokyo's underworld has reorganised; his old gang has lost ground; the woman who waited for him is somebody else's wife. He returns to the only thing he recognises, the back-room mahjong table.

Arthur Hamilton, in “Seconds”, is a forty-something New York banker with a wife who no longer speaks to him and a daughter who has moved away. A friend he believed dead phones him on a Friday night. Hamilton is told there is a company that will give him a different life. They will fake his death. They will give him a new face, a new body, a new name. Hamilton signs.

I love films about characters that can’t catch a break, who spend their lives desperate to achieve a fantasy, to climb a mountain, but find nothing but air and cold and death at the top.

Both men buy a substitute self. Muraki finds Saeko at the gambling tables, a young woman from a wealthy family, too well dressed for the room, already addicted to the rising stakes and looking for somewhere worse to take them. Hamilton becomes Tony Wilson, a Malibu painter with a beach house, an unmarried bohemian woman, and a circle of new friends who turn out to be other Reborn customers. Both substitutions fail in identical ways. The new life turns out to be the structure that disposes of him.

Spoilers ahead…

“Pale Flower” ends with Muraki in prison again, having committed a knife-killing for his bosses while Saeko watches from across the restaurant. Saeko herself, the film's last image tells us, is dead, heroin. “Seconds” ends with Hamilton-Wilson strapped to an operating table, looking up at a surgical light, about to be cut up so the company can use him as raw material for the next client.

Both films are about a man who pays to escape his life and discovers the escape was the trap.

The yakuza picture in 1964 was supposed to be sentimental. “Bushido” honour, brothers in arms, the duty owed to the boss. Shinoda made one in which the boss is barely visible, the gang structure is bureaucratic and pointless, and the only honest bond in the film is between a man twice the heroine's age and a young woman who wants to be murdered.

The Yakuza of Pale Flower and the organisation of Seconds rhyme, dark because of their bureaucracy rather then their evil, it’s their lack of spirit that make them haunting.

John Frankenheimer made “Seconds” immediately after “The Manchurian Candidate”  and “Seven Days in May”, the two films that defined American paranoia for the decade. “Seconds” is the third in that loose trilogy, but it is the worst-received and the strangest, and in my view the greatest.

Rock Hudson, having lobbied for the part, plays Wilson: and the casting is the film’s inside joke. Hudson, the matinee idol, the studio system's manufactured product, plays a man whose entire identity is a fabrication.

James Wong Howe shoots in fisheye, in handheld POV, in distorted close-ups that pull faces apart. The opening Grand Central sequence is a five-minute paranoid sustain, the camera a half-step behind Hamilton through the rush-hour crowd. The famous grape-stomping party, in which Wilson breaks down at a Bacchic Malibu gathering of his fellow Reborn customers, was filmed with the actors actually drinking; Frankenheimer wanted the dissociation to be real.

Shinoda and Frankenheimer did not know each other. Japanese postwar collapse and American postwar consumption were entirely different worlds. “Pale Flower” was a 1.85:1 black-and-white studio production financed for almost nothing; “Seconds” was a Paramount production shot by James Wong Howe at the height of his career — two Oscars behind him, the most distinctive eye in studio Hollywood. They cost different amounts of money. They were sold to different audiences.

What they share is a diagnosis arrived at independently and almost simultaneously: that postwar masculinity, in either of the two countries that had emerged from total war, was a hollow consumer mode. Both films treat the new substitute life, the gambling room, the Malibu beach house, as a hospice. Both end with the protagonist disposed of by the structure he had trusted to save him.

You watch them now and the films do not feel sixty years old. They feel like one continuous transmission, sent twice, from two different places, in case the first one didn't reach.

Where to Watch

Both are on the Criterion Channel and have had Criterion Collection releases. Search on Nous.Film to find updated streaming information.