"Frankenheimer and his cinematographer James Wong Howe (who justifiably won the Oscar) are operating in full baroque mode from the shadowy, off-kilter crowd scenes in Grand Central. Wong's canted, expressionist angles and lusciously dark and pinprick-sharp depth of focus become even more overpowering in the film's third act, as Arthur is kicked back into the company's infernal machinery. He failed to remake himself as an all-new kind of American and so is now meant for the scrap heap like every other worn-out cog in the machine. Within a few years, the capitalist and consumerist critique that Seconds put to such thrilling use would be more commonplace in a film industry desperate for counter-cultural cachet. But unlike many of those rebel statements against the mainstream, Frankenheimer's film understood that there were no easy answers to Arthur's kind of despair." - Chris Barsanti, PopMatters