The Twilight Zone, Vol. 6

"The selection of programs on this volume is somewhat downbeat (and a bit strange, since the actor James Best appears prominently in two of them), each one dealing with death in some respect, and two of the four having to do with the aftermath of war. ""The Passersby,"" written by Rod Serling, is the most underrated, largely a two-person drama starring James Gregory and Joanne Linville as a pair of observers, watching a seemingly endless procession of wounded men from the Civil War pass along a road adjoining her home. The acting is about as good as anything ever seen in the series, and the direction by Elliot Silverstein, who later did Cat Ballou, is a marvel to behold. The real treat here, however, is the score by Fred Steiner, a brilliantly elegiac work that incorporates elements of the folk song ""Black Is the Color Of My True Love's Hair,"" adding the final element of poignancy to the drama. Of the rest of the programs, ""The Grave"" and ""The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank"" have good reputations among the series' fans, in the spooky and comedic realms respectively. ""Deaths-Head Revisited,"" about a Nazi war criminal (Oscar Beregi confronting his guilty past and the wrath of one of his victims (Joseph Schildkraut) at the site of his crimes, is considered a classic. One must wonder if the CBS advertising department was as thrilled at the time -- prime-time network programs set at Dachau and featuring graphic accounts of Nazi atrocities were a relative rarity in 1962. The transfers are par for this series of DVDs, which is to say excellent quality, with the same clever menu design used on the other releases. The disc goes to the menu on start-up, and programs can be accessed individually, along with the historical notes by author Marc Scott Zicree, or watched straight through in sequence as though this were a laserdisc release."