John Frankenheimer’s “Seconds” will linger a lot longer than the title suggests in the mind of anyone who chooses to watch it. In fact, it might be one of the most haunting American films to come out of the 1960s, or any decade for that matter.... Frankenheimer’s masterpiece grows in stature with each passing year due the relevant themes of existentialism, and free-will. But much like the main character, the film starts off as one thing, reinvents itself, and becomes something else entirely in the brutal, yet necessary, final moments. In a span of a few seconds, it evolves into a film about the devastating inhumanity caused by corporate greed...Frankenheimer’s “Seconds” was booed at the Cannes Film Festival for all the wrong reasons—for being way ahead of its time. And while it had a premature death on its initial release, in an ironic twist of fate, "Seconds" found poetic justice. Like its main character, it is reliving a second life.

Cynical and emotionally dystopian, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds was released in 1966 to almost unanimous aversion. While other filmmakers explored the freedoms associated with the 1960s, Frankenheimer released a film in which the aftereffects of McCarthyism were still apparent, and the American Dream was a lie. Despite the draw of popular Hollywood star Rock Hudson appearing as Arthur Hamilton’s “reborn” self Tony Wilson, the subject matter isolated and even attacked its audience, leaving the film unappreciated for decades.... The narrative’s protagonist remains the same throughout, as we see when the same languid quality that filled Hamilton’s life soon fills Wilson’s. Hudson’s performance is astonishing; he adopts Randolph’s inner emptiness in his gestures and expressions to make the transition between actors seamless....Frankenheimer persuaded Paramount to screen it at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966, where it was greeted with such acidity from the customarily impassioned Cannes critics that the director refused to attend the festival’s subsequent press events. Frankenheimer was devastated. For its stateside release, Paramount, reeling from the poor reception at Cannes, abbreviated the original cut to lessen the liberated display of sexuality in the bacchanalia sequence; the studio also barely marketed the picture, and it ultimately failed to draw audiences or impress critics of the time, flopping miserably.... Today, Seconds has developed a following and become something of a cult masterpiece. Frankenheimer himself noted how the film “went from failure to classic without ever being a success”.

Desperate to escape his dreary, dead-end life, an aging banker succumbs to a mysterious organization's offer of a new identity and a fresh start. Surgically transformed into a handsome, young man, he begins a jet-set existence among a shadowy community of similar "reborns." But his heady exhilaration spirals into a heart-stopping terror as he discovers that his newly purchased life carries a terrifying price.

US suburbia boredom is treated in an original manner in this cross between a sci-fi opus, a thriller, a suspense pic and a parable on certain aspects of American middle-class life.