Rock Hudson’s vacant handsomeness was seldom used better.

Despite bombing during its initial 1966 release, John Frankenheimer’s sci-fi psychodrama Seconds is something of a minor classic, telling the story of a suburbanite undergoing a curious cure for the mid-life crisis.

John Randolph plays Arthur Hamilton, a respectable banker who lives a life of quiet desperation with his passionless marriage and humdrum job. His youth gone and his existential angst ever-present, Hamilton is driven to an extreme solution–pay a clandestine corporation big bucks to fake his death and reinvent him (via plastic surgery and any other means necessary) as a handsome bohemian artist (now played by Rock Hudson). But what if the artsy life and casual sex he wanted isn’t what he really needed?

As Seconds careers toward its genre-appropriate chilling conclusion, the film’s underlying question is more chilling still: What if it isn’t poor life choices but a poverty deep within ourselves preventing us from attaining happiness?•