Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)It's true that the Volume 12 TZ DVD is not the best in the series of 40 plus Twilight Zone DVDs.
But "The Trade-Ins" has as a powerful asset for anyone interested in the history of the theatre of the 20th century: the very renowned (then, at least) actor, Joseph Schildkraut. This must have been one of his last performances in any medium. Like "The Passerby" -- another TZ that comes in for criticism for what is by modern, and rather callous, theatrical taste, a maudlin sentimentality -- "The Trade-Ins" dares to deal with the human pathos of bodily decrepitude and encroaching mortality -- topics you'll never find even alluded today to in any kind of television series. "The Trade-Ins" is sentimental yes but it has a truth to tell, and it tells it poetically. (No poetry allowed in the age of "The Sopranos" and "The Simpsons".)
Consider Robert Browning's poem, "Rabbi Ben Ezra," which has the elderly rabbi exhorting his melancholy wife with the line, "Grow old along with me...the best is yet to be!" That would have been recognized as a manipulative poet's lie even in the 19th century.
To its credit, "The Trade-Ins" avoided this kind of emolient poetic untruthfulness -- and did so daring in a mass medium, television, which was denounced in those days a "a vast wasteland." (What would Newton Minnow make of the tube in 2004?)
In "The Trade-Ins," two aging lovers must make a decision that is no more than a scriptwriter's not terribly imaginative contrivance. But the episode still makes a powerful point about the nature of true conjugal love.....
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