Last Friday, the sheriff called the home of drunken artist Sam Evans. He warned Sam that dashing action hero Burke Devlin might be coming to his house, and urged him to call back if he did. Burke did go to Sam’s house, but Sam didn’t call the sheriff. After a brief confrontation with Burke, Sam ran away and left Burke alone with his daughter Maggie and their house-guest, well-meaning governess Vicki.
Yesterday, the sheriff called reclusive matriarch Liz at her home, the great house of Collinwood. He warned Liz that Burke might be coming to her house, and urged her to call back if he did so. Burke showed up at the house at the end of the episode.
Liz doesn’t call the sheriff either. After Burke refuses her commands to get out of her house, she decides to confuse him with a display of hospitality. It turns out to be quite an effective tactic. When Vicki walks in and asks Burke what he’s doing at Collinwood, he replies in bewilderment “I think I’m having tea.”
Burke takes the tea tray from Liz
Burke had gone to Collinwood looking for Liz’ brother, ne’er-do-well Roger. Roger is with Sam at the tavern in town. Yesterday we heard some new music at the tavern, a funky tune that sounds like it was cut from a Booker T and the MGs album. It played then as grizzled caretaker Matthew sat by himself waiting for Burke to come in so he could threaten him. It was so obviously not something Matthew would listen to that it served to emphasize his isolation. It plays again today as Roger and Sam reach the end of a strange conversation, with Roger first refusing Sam’s offer to leave town for money, then Sam refusing Roger’s offer to give him money to leave town. As Roger and Sam, Louis Edmonds and David Ford have so much fun with this exchange that it feels like an Abbott and Costello routine. The music is different enough from what we’ve heard on the show so far that it highlights Roger and Sam’s silliness.
I should also mention that in the opening voiceover, Vicki says the phrase “Dark Shadows.” This is the second time we’ve heard a character say the title of the series. The first was in episode 46, when Roger had said that a drawing by his son, problem child David, had captured “Collinwood, with all its dark shadows.”
Dashing action hero Burke Devlin goes to the local tavern, The Blue Whale. He sees Matthew Morgan, maniacally devoted servant of his foes, the wealthy Collins family. Matthew demands that Burke leave town. When Burke refuses, Matthew calmly informs Burke that he will kill him. Mitch Ryan plays Burke’s reaction to this announcement with a priceless look of disbelief. There’s a flicker of light in his eyes in the first second of the reaction, and he holds it long enough to be hilarious to watch:
Burke is stunned by Matthew’s casual announcement
Their conversation devolves into a bar fight. After the sheriff breaks it up, Ryan again has an opportunity for a memorable facial expression:
Burke recovering from the bar fight
Burke has been obnoxious enough, and Thayer David’s Matthew is engaging enough, that we found ourselves cheering Matthew on and laughing when Burke lost the fight.
In the sheriff’s office, both men get stern scoldings, Matthew for assaulting Burke, Burke for interfering with the police investigation of the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy. The sheriff releases both, warning Burke to stay away from the estate of Collinwood and Matthew to stay on it. Alone in the office, he calls reclusive matriarch Liz to warn her that Burke might be coming to Collinwood, and asking her to call him if he does.
Liz tells first the sheriff, then her daughter, flighty heiress Carolyn, that she doesn’t think Burke will come to the estate. The sheriff had previously assured Matthew that Burke wouldn’t go there “if he knows what’s good for him.” If soap opera characters knew what was good for them, they wouldn’t get much screen time, so of course the episode ends with Burke entering the house.
Each episode of Dark Shadows begins with a voiceover. In this phase of the show, the voiceovers are all narrated by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as Victoria Winters, well-meaning governess, and are brief passages of almost purely decorative prose, meant only to set a mood and to vanish from the audience’s memory as soon as the action starts. Art Wallace and Francis Swann, the writers credited for the first 97 episodes, were old pros who had been turning out scripts for decades, and were good at staying out of their own way. That’s why I haven’t yet said anything about any of the opening voiceovers- when Wallace or Swann set out to write something forgettable, they succeeded. By the time I started writing, I had no recollection of them whatever.
Today’s opening voiceover is unusually substantive, so much so that it threatens to leave a trace in the audience’s mind:
My name is Victoria Winters. Once again it is quiet in Collinwood. There is no sound but the ticking of the great clock in the entrance hall. And the lonely footsteps of a woman who hasn’t left its grounds in eighteen years. A woman whose life is limited to musty corridors and the endless beat of a grandfather clock. A beat that seems to ignore the vitality of the world around it.
Vicki names herself, names the estate where she lives, talks about how quiet it is, mentions the clock, tells the audience that the lady of the house is a recluse who hasn’t left home in eighteen years, complains about the air quality in the house, brings the clock up again, and assures us that interesting things are happening everywhere except here. It leaves us wondering why Vicki is so hung up on the clock, why she doesn’t run the vacuum cleaner herself, and why, if the entire world surrounding Collinwood is chock full of vitality, they don’t turn the camera in some other direction.
That’s the sort of thing we’re going to get from Wallace and Swann’s immediate successors, Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein. In writing their opening voiceovers, Sproat and Marmorstein fell between two stools. They didn’t write brief, deliberately forgettable passages as Wallace and Swann had done; nor did they integrate the opening voiceovers into the action of the show, as would happen in later years when the story is moving very fast and the episodes start with detailed recaps of events so far. Instead, Sproat and Marmorstein saw the voiceovers as vehicles for long passages of flowery, over-developed imagery. Those are certainly no more effective at setting a mood than were Wallace and Swann’s brief remarks, but they do both try the patience of the audience and linger as distractions. That’s one of the things that prejudices viewers against the character of Vicki- since so many episodes from the Sproat/ Marmorstein era start with Vicki rambling on about the weather or making vague remarks about “one small boy” or whatever, the first impression she leaves on viewers who start watching with episodes from that period is that of a prattling fool.
While Wallace and Swann are the only writers whose names have appeared in the credits thus far, it is very possible that others not credited contributed additional bits. I may be wrong, but my nose catches a whiff of Marmorstein in these six strange, distracting sentences. The description of the clock while we’re looking at it, the specified number of years since reclusive matriarch Liz has left the estate, the evocation of the “musty corridors,” the yearning glance at the eventful world outside, are all typical of Marmorstein’s attempts to turn the voiceovers into freestanding dramatic monologues, but without identifiable characters or plot development.
Today’s episode doesn’t shed much light on Vicki’s relationship to the clock or on the standards of cleanliness in the great house of Collinwood. Instead, it’s a kaleidoscope episode, in which each change of scene varies the combination of characters who interact on each set. The action plays out on two sets this time, the foyer/ drawing room representing the downstairs of the great house, and the Blue Whale tavern, representing the low and bustling life of the village. Because the sets typify the “musty corridors” inside the house and the “vitality of the world around it,” the episode is also a diptych of sorts- not Art Wallace’s usual diptych contrasting two pairs of people, but a diptych contrasting two places and the attitudes those places inspire in the people who spend time in them.
The five pieces tumbling about in today’s kaleidoscope are reclusive matriarch Liz, tightly-wound handyman Matthew, flighty heiress Carolyn, hardworking young fisherman Joe, and Maggie, the nicest girl in town. The regular bartender at the Blue Whale gets a fair bit of screen time as well. In the first 63 episodes, he’s answered to names including “Joe,” Andy,” “Mike,” and “Punchy.” Today, Joe the fisherman calls the bartender “Punchy,” a name he called him most recently in episode 56, the same episode where drunken artist Sam calls him “Mike.” Maybe we’re supposed to think that the young men know the bartender as “Punchy,” the older men as “Mike.” Eventually the show settles on the name “Bob” for him, perhaps because the performer’s name was Bob O’Connell. In one episode (#319,) Sam calls him “Ba-ba-roony,” giving rise to the idea that his name is Bob Rooney.
Liz appears only at Collinwood, of course; Joe and the bartender appear only in the bar. The others migrate back and forth between the two sets. We first see Carolyn with Joe in the bar, talking about what a flop their date has been and how pointless their whole relationship is. Maggie interrupts this thrilling conversation, looking for her father, Sam the drunken artist. After puzzling Carolyn and Joe with a number of cryptic remarks, Maggie gives up looking for her father and goes to Collinwood to look for high-born ne’er-do-well Roger. Roger isn’t home, so she winds up talking to Liz. This is the 63rd episode, and it’s the first time we’ve seen these two major characters together.
We first see Matthew in Collinwood, telling Liz how much he wants to help her. He then goes to the bar, where Carolyn and Joe see him. Matthew is looking for dashing action hero Burke Devlin, whom he hates. He implies to Carolyn and Joe that Burke is to blame for the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy. Joe doesn’t like Burke any more than Matthew does. The instant he hears Matthew’s idea, he is all in on it. Carolyn resists the suggestion.
Carolyn goes home to Collinwood. Maggie has explained to Liz that Burke has been saying terrible things about her father, that she can’t find her father to ask him about Burke’s allegations, and that Roger might know something about them. Liz urges Maggie to believe in her father, and to regard Burke as a dangerous, unscrupulous man capable of many dark deeds. Hearing the last part of this, Carolyn asks her mother if she believes that Burke is capable of murder. Yes, Liz says, she does believe that he is capable of that.
Drunken artist Sam Evans meets with dashing action hero Burke Devlin in Burke’s hotel room. They recap the events of the previous episode. Burke accuses Sam of killing their mutual friend Bill Malloy. Sam’s anguished denials convince Burke that he is innocent.
Well-meaning governess Vicki encounters high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins at the mansion where they both live. They recap the events of the previous episode. Vicki is in no way impressed by Roger, responding to his charm by bluntly telling him that she knows what he is trying to get her to tell him, to his attempts at intimidation with bland indifference, to his offer of a higher-paying job at the home of friends of his in Florida with a polite refusal, and to his exclamation “Miss Winters, you’re a fool!” with a cheerful “Probably.”
It’s a pleasant 22 minutes for fans of the four actors and of their characters, even if screenwriter Art Wallace isn’t exactly tearing through story material at a breakneck pace. On his blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning, Marc Masse shows that this episode is intricately connected with #37, that there are several visual and verbal echoes that pair shots in this one to specific shots in that one, and that if we examine those pairs of shots we will gather more than a little information pertinent to the mystery of Bill Malloy’s last moments. He also acknowledges that, while these echoes are so numerous and so precise that they must be deliberate, it is unlikely that more than a tiny percentage of the original audience was aware of them:
Such minute and momentary details are fine in an episodic drama presentation of thirty minutes to an hour or in a movie that runs ninety minutes to two hours, where the mind can log these accumulating details as they are made available; but to just drop a subtle clue, like the face of the foyer clock, toward the end of a Monday episode and expect the viewer, all however many millions of them, to recall such a seemingly random instance more than three weeks later is just one of the limitations inherent in serialized drama that the producers have to work around.
Perhaps this is one reason the show has done so well in the age of streaming video and online discussion, when obsessive fans can watch and rewatch every episode, read about them all, and share their own thoughts. Tellers of mystery stories find themselves committed to slowly doling out clues throughout the whole development of the plot, including subtle clues that few people will catch the first time through. That’s built into the genre, and is hard to avoid doing even if the mystery story comes to us in a form like 1960s daytime television that simply cannot deliver that information effectively to an audience. What must have been frustrating or mystifying or outright invisible to the original audience can now be central to our enjoyment of the episodes.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that my post about episode 60 was unfair. She objected to the sentence “The Friday cliffhanger is Burke asking if he may join the Evanses and Vicki for dinner.” As she explained, that moment actually is an effective cliffhanger. I hadn’t mentioned that the sheriff had called drunken artist Sam Evans to warn him that dashing action hero Burke Devlin might be coming to his house, that he urged Sam to call back if Burke did come, and that actor David Ford played Sam’s reaction to this call with a convincing display of terror.
Sam trying to conceal his fear from the women behind him and the man on the other end of the call
I also failed to mention the shot when Burke enters the room. Before Sam can get the words out to tell his daughter Maggie not to open the door, Burke has burst in. The scenes in the Evans cottage have been dimly lit, with all three figures moving before dark backgrounds. When the light colored door swings open, its relative brightness feels for a second like a flash, and when he stands in front of it Burke cuts a stark figure. We see him in contrast with Maggie, who stands against a dark background, wearing a dark top and a stunned expression:
Burke enters the Evans cottage
Throughout the episode, Sam had failed repeatedly to exercise any measure of control even in a social situation in his own home where the only other people are his daughter Maggie and well-meaning governess Vicki, the two kindliest characters on the show. The irruption of Burke into that setting is indeed a formidable moment for Sam.
So yes, that was a more plausible Friday cliffhanger than I allowed. Perhaps I was prejudiced against it because I remembered this episode. The purpose of a cliffhanger is to bring the audience back for the next installment. Typically, the next installment will begin by resolving the cliffhanger as quickly and unceremoniously as possible. But today, Burke’s intrusion into the Evans cottage drags on and on. In the process, it does serious harm to Burke’s character.
After rushing into the Evans cottage, Burke defies Sam and Maggie to say that he isn’t welcome. Maggie, unaware of the sheriff’s call urging Sam to let him know if Burke shows up, breaks down and says that of course Burke is welcome. Burke then tries to order Vicki and Maggie into the kitchen so that he can be alone with Sam. Neither woman is at all meek, however, and they stand up to Burke’s browbeating admirably.
Not so Sam. He takes the first opportunity to run away. We know that Sam has his guilty secrets, but he is a likable character, and it is hurts to imagine the pain that will await him the rest of his life whenever he remembers the night he left his daughter and her sweet young friend to face an angry man alone in his house. Sam doesn’t even call the sheriff. Instead, in his panic he goes to the hotel to try to retrieve a sealed envelope he had Maggie leave in the safe there. That gives us a scene with Conrad Bain as hotel manager Mr Wells. Bain is always a delight, and his little business about the envelope is certainly the most pleasant part of the episode. At the end of the episode, Sam will meet Burke at the hotel and ask to talk with him alone in his room, leaving us with the image of him trying to redeem himself in his own eyes.
Before that end comes, however, we have much, much more of Burke trying to bully the young women in the cottage. He won’t let them eat dinner. He harangues them about his manslaughter conviction. In the course of that harangue, it becomes clear that he isn’t thinking at all clearly. “I was drunk and don’t remember too much about that night, but I do remember Roger Collins taking over the wheel.” That’s just delicious- he was hopelessly drunk, blacked out in fact, but he’s pretty sure he remembers giving the keys to someone else before the fatal collision. The fact that his substitute driver was just as drunk as he was doesn’t seem to occur to him as a flaw in his “defense,” nor does the fact that this one convenient piece of information is the only thing to surface from his alcoholic stupor. That sort of thinking runs at such an oblique angle to reality that there would be nothing to say to Burke even if he were willing to listen to you. He goes on to suggest to Maggie that her father may have killed their old friend Bill Malloy, and refuses to leave the house when Maggie tells him to do so.
Burke’s abuse of Sam, Maggie, and Vicki makes it hard for us to like Burke as much as the show needs us to like him. We’re supposed to perk up when he’s on screen, not only because we don’t know what he might do next, but also because we don’t know whether we will approve of whatever surprising thing he makes happen. Even when he is trying to destroy the family to which our point of view character, Vicki, owes her loyalty, we’re supposed to want to see more of him. But when we see him treat Vicki and Maggie the way he does here, the image of him as a grinning thug sticks in the mind, and it is hard to want more of that.
All the more so, perhaps, because of his ineffectiveness as a thug. Our first concern with the show is that it should tell an interesting story, and Burke earns our attention by providing exciting story points. We can like even a very evil character who makes exciting things happen, but someone who simply shows up at your house when you’re about to eat, keeps you from your dinner, rambles on with a lot of nonsense, insults your father, and refuses to leave is just testing your patience for bad conduct.
We can compare Burke as the villain of this episode to another, more interesting villain. Throughout 1966, Mitch Ryan was not only playing Burke on Dark Shadows, but was also on Broadway in Wait Until Dark. In that play, he was one of the con men who, under the control of a mysterious figure calling himself Harry Roat, junior (and senior, but that’s another matter,) talk their way into a blind woman’s apartment and try, at first by trickery and then by threats of murder, to get her to hand over something valuable that she hadn’t realized she had in her possession. Like Maggie and Vicki, the heroine of the play stands up to Ryan’s character and the other villains. She ultimately triumphs over them. Unlike Burke, who is simply indulging on rage for its own sake and boring everyone as he does so, Roat has devised a brilliantly clever scheme to trick his victim, a scheme which fails only because she is his equal in brilliance and his superior in other ways. Wait Until Dark was a major hit in that original Broadway run, as was the movie version the next year and as many revivals of it have been in the years since. If Roat’s activities were as pointless in the play as Burke’s are in this episode, I very much doubt it would have been produced at all.
Soap operas are supposed to have a weekly rhythm. Fridays bring a whirlwind of flashy, unexpected events, building up to a big cliffhanger. On Monday, the cliffhanger is resolved and the flashy, unexpected stuff is sorted out so that new viewers can find their way into the show. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, you experiment with new storylines that may or may not go anywhere, and on Thursdays you set up for another boffo Friday.
At no point in its run did Dark Shadows adhere to this pattern. This week, for example, has had four relatively fast-paced episodes on Monday through Thursday, then slows down for a Friday episode consisting of a couple of leisurely conversations. Conversations in which the audience is presented with a lot of basic exposition, but still, a big shift down in dramatic intensity from the four days leading up to it. A bit later, after writer Art Wallace leaves the show, there will be weeks with no apparent structure at all, certainly no boffo whirlwind Fridays. After the show becomes a hit and Sam Hall takes the lead among the writing staff, every day will be a whirlwind, and every commercial break a cliffhanger.
One of today’s conversations takes place in the home Maggie Evans, the nicest girl in town, shares with her father, drunken artist Sam. The other takes place in the sheriff’s office.
Maggie has brought well-meaning governess Vicki home for dinner. They talk about Vicki’s quest to learn the secret of her origins and about the manslaughter case that sent dashing action hero Burke Devlin to prison ten years ago. Meanwhile, Burke has barged into the sheriff’s office and is demanding information about the ongoing investigation into the mysterious death of plant manager Bill Malloy. The sheriff gives Burke more answers than it would be proper for an investigator to give a member of the public in real life, but nonetheless frustrates his need to dash into heroic action. Burke leaves the sheriff’s office, and barges into the Evans cottage as dinner is served. The Friday cliffhanger is Burke asking if he may join the Evanses and Vicki for dinner.
I suppose you could call this one of Art Wallace’s diptychs. Both conversations feature insistent questioners and reluctant responders. Burke improperly demands information from the sheriff. The sheriff parries his demands, observing Burke’s reactions as he sizes him up as a suspect in the case. The sheriff remains very much in control of the situation. As in previous episodes, we see that the sheriff alone exercises power in the sheriff’s office. By contrast, Sam loses control entirely in the face of his two questioners. Again as in previous episodes, we see that Sam has no power to resolve a conflict, whether at home or anywhere else.
That’s the dramatic content of the episode. The expository content is much more involved. Vicki looks through Sam’s paintings, and finds a portrait that strongly resembles her. When Sam tells her that the painting is 25 years old and that the model was a Collinsport girl, Vicki is excited, thinking she may have found a relative. Sam tells her he doesn’t believe that’s possible. He had heard that the model, whose name was Betty Hanscombe, had died a few months after he painted her portrait, years before Vicki was born, and that she had no living relatives.
Note that Sam had only heard that Betty died. She had left town before then, and had no close connections to anyone with whom Sam was in touch. He could easily have heard wrong. So experienced soap opera watchers will brace themselves for the possibility that Betty Hanscombe will make a surprise entrance at some point and reveal herself to be Vicki’s mother and someone else’s secret half-sister.
When Maggie and Vicki ask Sam about the manslaughter case, he becomes agitated. Trapped into telling the story, he takes a drink and looks away from the young women. He tells essentially the same story high-born ne’er-do-well Roger had told his sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, in episode 32, but with some details added.
Burke and Roger were extremely close in those days, ten years ago. For a moment, Sam seems to be having trouble finding the words to express just how close. Along with Burke’s girlfriend Laura, they went drinking one night at a bar on the road between Collinsport and Bangor. Witnesses at the bar testified that Burke was so drunk they had to carry him to his car, and that he insisted on driving. Roger and Laura were his passengers. Burke himself admitted that he blacked out and couldn’t remember the drive. At some point, the car hit and killed a man named Hansen and kept going. At the trial, Roger and Laura testified that Burke was driving when his car hit Hansen. Burke thought that he might have got out of the driver’s seat and handed the keys to Roger before the accident. Burke was convicted, and publicly swore that he would avenge himself on Roger. A week after he was sentenced, Roger and Laura were married.
So that’s the basis for “The Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline. I’m not a criminal lawyer, but I wonder if Burke wouldn’t have been guilty of manslaughter no matter who was behind the wheel at the moment of the collision. By all accounts, Burke drove drunk, and was drunk in his car when it killed someone. If at some point he stopped driving and handed the keys to someone else whom he knew also to be drunk, that would indeed add to that person’s culpability, but I don’t see how it would clear Burke’s name. To do that, Burke would have to change the events themselves.
To make sense of the storyline, perhaps we can revisit the tale of the night of the accident. Two lovers and their friend were in a car involved in a hit and run. Afterward, one lover turned against the other, and took up with the friend. Everyone thought the lovers before that night were Burke and Laura, and that the friend was Roger. But if the men were lovers and Laura were the friend tagging along on their date, Burke’s frantic campaign to alter the past and Roger’s grim determination to hide it take on a new significance.
The cast of the show and its writing staff were largely drawn from Broadway, where in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s many playwrights had hits with dramas in which some people try to rewrite history and others try to conceal it in desperate attempts to erase unconventional sexual relationships. Indeed, when Sam stumbles in his attempt to find words to describe the bygone intimacy Roger and Burke shared, we can’t help but remember that Sam is played by David Ford, fresh off a long engagement as Big Daddy in a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It is by no means fanciful to wonder if that stumble hints at the suspicion of a relationship Tennessee Williams would have found interesting.
Miscellaneous:
At the end of his post about this episode on Dark Shadows from the Beginning, Marc Masse goes on at length about other things you might have seen on television in mid-September 1966. This is not my favorite feature of his blog, but this time it includes a couple of irresistible bits from commercials featuring Dark Shadows cast members. Here’s a still from a spot in which David Henesy sells cereal (with a side of racism, but it’s hard to imagine that was his fault):
Yet another G. G. E.- Genuinely Good Episode. There have been several of those this week.
The sheriff is in the big dark house on the estate of Collinwood, questioning high-born ne’er-do-well Roger about the mysterious death of plant manager Bill Malloy. Roger’s sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, joins them. They deny knowing anything, including things we’ve seen them find out in previous episodes. Much of the conversation is to do with drunken artist Sam Evans and the idea that Sam might be keeping a secret.
Roger’s son, nine year old problem child David, is all smiles when he drops in on his well-meaning governess Vicki. Convinced that she can befriend David, Vicki responds instantly to his smile. She asks why he’s so chipper. He says that it’s because he will never see his father again. The sheriff has come to arrest him for murder.
Vicki asks him if the sheriff said that he was going to arrest Roger, and David admits that he did not. But David is sure that he will. He is sure he is guilty. He lists the three sources of information he has that confirm for him that his father killed Bill- the ghosts of the Widows told him, he saw it in his crystal ball, and he used a tide table to calculate the spot at which Bill fell in the water. When Vicki insists that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he says she’s just refusing to face facts because she’s afraid his father will kill her, too. By the end of what had begun with the sound of a very cozy conversation, David tells Vicki that he might not be unhappy if his father does murder her.
Vicki keeps her eyes on David throughout this conversation, listens carefully even when he keeps talking after she’s told him to stop, and looks thoughtful after he leaves the room. As Vicki and David, Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy play a wide enough range of emotions in this scene that we, in spite of the dialogue, can see why Vicki is still sure she and David will someday be friends.
Vicki trying to think of a way to reach David
David goes downstairs in time to see the sheriff leaving. He asks him if he’s arresting his father. The sheriff says he’d thought about it, but that Roger talked him out of it. That’s a pretty weird thing for a policeman to tell a boy, but Dana Elcar, as the sheriff, is such an engaging presence that we can accept it, somehow. I think it’s because he makes a show of choosing his words carefully and plays the scene with an eye on Roger, so that we can regard his strange words as a tactic to unsettle his suspect.
David gives the sheriff the book of maps and tide tables, open to the page where he marked the spot at which he believes Bill went into the water. The sheriff thanks David and tells him to keep up the detective work. David and Roger stare daggers at each other. In this staring match, David Henesy and Louis Edmonds, as Roger, do such a compelling job of embodying filial hate that the audience can respond in only one of two ways- either it will send a chill down your spine, or you’ll laugh out loud. This time we laughed, because we’ve seen so much of the show we feel we know the actors and know that they had great fun with scenes like this. I think we were chilled the first time through, though.
Staring contest
After the sheriff leaves, Liz tells Roger that she has now lied to the sheriff for him, and demands that he tell her the truth. Roger says that he, not dashing action hero Burke Devlin, was responsible for a killing ten years ago, that his testimony at the trial that sent Burke to prison was a lie, and that he murdered Bill because he was afraid Bill would expose that lie. Liz trembles, sits down, says “It can’t be true,” then Roger bursts out that of course it can’t be true, not one word of it is true. Having heard the story out loud, Liz is happy to disbelieve it.
David listened to this conversation through the keyhole. When Vicki catches him listening, David declares that he had heard his father admit his crimes. He heard the denial as well, but that did not make the impression on him that it made on his aunt. He is as highly motivated to accept the confession as Liz is to reject it.
After David is sent to his room, Liz and Roger ask Vicki what he told her he heard. Vicki says it was nothing- “His imagination.” She is on her way into town to have dinner with friends. Liz asks who those friends are. Vicki tells her they are Maggie Evans and Maggie’s father.
Vicki leaves, and Liz asks Roger if Maggie Evans’ father is Sam Evans. Yes, says Roger. Why does that bother you, asks Liz. Roger denies that it bothers him, and stomps away up the stairs. Liz looks thoughtful, much as Vicki had looked thoughtful when David talked about her as a potential murder victim and walked out of her room.
Liz wonders about Roger
Denial, the psychological defense mechanism, presents a rich challenge to an actor. Liz cannot allow herself to believe that Roger is guilty of the crimes that have been discussed in this episode, and so she gladly accepts his declaration that “not one ugly word” of his confession to her was true. Yet Liz is an intelligent woman, and she knows her brother extremely well. She certainly knows him well enough to know that he is a scoundrel through and through, and it is obvious he has a great deal to hide in connection with these events. So as Liz, Joan Bennett has to play a person who simultaneously rejects an idea and accepts it. That’s a challenge to which she rises brilliantly.
The comparison between Vicki’s pensive moment after David leaves her room and Liz’ pensive moment after Roger leaves the foyer highlights the similarities between Roger and David. Those similarities are prominent this week. In yesterday’s episode, David was cool as a cucumber while others stormed and raged. Today, Roger plays it cool while confessing to a list of serious crimes, some of which he actually committed, and then exposes that list as a tactic to force Liz to deny his guilt. When David is in Vicki’s room, Vicki compares him to his father, to which David replies that he never killed anyone. If she were less concerned with winning David’s friendship, Vicki could have told him it wasn’t for lack of trying- he did tamper with the brakes on his father’s car and cause him a serious wreck, after all.
We can only assume that Roger has always been like this, that he once was what David is, and that unless something changes David will someday be what Roger is. Vicki’s pensiveness is all about the future, about the difference she might be able to make for David. Liz’ reaches into the past, back to all the times she, as Roger’s bossy big sister, tried to keep her bratty little brother out of trouble, and to cover up for him when he slipped beyond her influence. Whatever approach Vicki comes up with in her quest for David’s friendship, then, will have to be different from the approach Liz took to Roger throughout their early days.
Art Wallace, credited as the author of this episode’s script, specialized in finely-etched character studies. Often as not, he favored a diptych structure, in which the episode intercuts between two groups of characters. In the contrast between their relationships, we learn more about them in a shorter time than we could if one group was on screen the whole time.
He doesn’t use that structure today. It’s more of a kaleidoscope, in which the characters tumble about, moving from set to set, recombining in different groups. The five reflecting surfaces in this particular kaleidoscope are drunken artist Sam; hardworking young fisherman Joe; the sheriff; flighty heiress Carolyn; and problem child David. Their reactions to the mysterious death of plant manager Bill Malloy have set them spinning.
Carolyn, Sam, and the sheriff play it very hot. Bill was like a father to Carolyn. She wants to keen over him, and is raging with frustration that she can’t find anyone to wail with. Bill was trying to prove that Sam had committed a crime. He can barely restrain himself from panicking in his fear that he will be accused of killing Bill. The sheriff is investigating the case. He wants answers from Sam, and comes down on him very hard when he doesn’t get them.
Joe is more subdued. He is clearly saddened by the death of a man he worked for and admired, but is quiet and attentive to others. When Sam insistently tries to get him to figure out what the police will be able to reconstruct from the place where Bill’s body washed up on shore, Joe very patiently explains about tide tables and the like. When the sheriff comes upon Sam and Joe and suggests Joe go away, he complies in good humor.
David is absolutely cool. He is trying to figure out where Bill’s body first went into the water in hopes that he will be able to prove that his father, whom he hates, murdered Bill. When Carolyn demands that he adopt an attitude consistent with hers, he flatly refuses. She persists, he delivers one incisive comeback after another.
Carolyn bemoans their fate, living in the walls of the mansion at Collinwood. David says he likes it, that it’s fun to live in a house with real ghosts. “Sure, it’s scary sometimes,” he allows, but the ghosts are his friends. Maybe Mr Malloy will be one of them. Carolyn is exasperated by this reply, but can’t bring herself to deny that the house is haunted.
Joe shows up at the big dark house on the hill to see Carolyn. David picks up where Sam left off, and questions Joe about how to read a tide table. Unlike Sam, David has a set of tide tables with him, and the two of them sit down and start doing calculations. Carolyn reacts to this with abhorrence. Joe leaves with Carolyn, but not before encouraging David to stick with his calculations. He tells the boy to ask his father for help, a suggestion to which David reacts sharply.
After Joe and Carolyn have left the house, a knock comes at the door. David exclaims joyously, “Joe, I knew you’d come back!” When he opens the door, though, it isn’t Joe- it’s the sheriff. David resumes his perfect serenity and asks, “Have you come to see my father?” When he says yes, David goes to fetch him, a blissful smile on his face.
In the opening teaser, dashing action hero Burke Devlin is having lunch in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn. As usual, he’s alone there. He strikes up a conversation with Maggie Evans, who runs the place. She listens sympathetically while he tells her that he’s worried about the missing man, plant manager Bill Malloy. He goes on about the great meal he’ll buy for his dear friend Bill when he finally turns up. Maggie has to break the news to him that the Coast Guard has fished Bill’s corpse out of the sea.
Burke suspects that his bitter enemy, high-born ne’er -do-well Roger Collins, is responsible for Bill’s death. After he telephones the sheriff’s office to ask for information and doesn’t get answers, he returns to the restaurant, agitated. Well-meaning governess Vicki walks in; Burke snaps at her about Roger, and they quarrel. Burke goes to the sheriff’s office with this suspicion. So far from enlisting the sheriff as an ally against Roger, Burke finds himself being questioned as a suspect.
Burke returns to the restaurant. Vicki is still there, having had a heart-to-heart with her new friend Maggie. Burke yet again asks Vicki for a date; she yet again refuses him, this time because she’s planning to have dinner at Maggie’s house where she will be introduced to Maggie’s father, Burke’s former friend Sam.
Patrick McCray and Marc Masse write characteristically admirable posts about this episode on their blogs. McCray cites this episode as a fine example of the kind of story-telling that defined the show in its first 42 weeks:
Episode 57 is a focused study in how much the show would change in its first year. That’s not damning with faint praise nor stating the obvious about supernatural vs secular threats. It’s a compelling little episode that moves faster than many in the post-1897 run of the series. Within it is an entirely different approach to storytelling. Far more than other soaps, DARK SHADOWS was a show about action. Characters did things in the present rather than just talk about things done in the past. And when time, space, morality, and death are irrelevant to many of your main characters, it’s easy to present a Nietzschean amusement park of action and story twists. That’s not how the program began, though. It was only with the introduction of Laura Collins that DARK SHADOWS became a series about possibilities, not limits. But limits, and seeing attractive, interesting people struggle against them, is the bread and butter of terrestrial TV drama, and episode 57 is a beautifully executed cage.
He goes on to talk about the sorts of characters they can have in this period of the show who would become impossible in later days. Bill Malloy, for example: “Malloy was too good at getting things done to coexist with incredibly vulnerable monsters whose only protection came from how unobservant everyone else was.” Because of the centrality of the character of Liz and the theme of her seclusion in this period of the show, I’d always thought of the first 42 weeks as a study in the social and psychological effects of the refusal to face unpleasant facts. But of course denial is still the show’s great theme all the way through.
Masse discusses the apparent discontinuity of Burke’s wistful tone before he learns that Bill is dead with Burke and Bill’s relationship as we saw it when Bill was alive:
And since when has Burke even cared about Malloy as a person? If he really had revered Malloy for having given him his start as he claims today, then how come he didn’t buy Malloy that best meal ever upon his return to Collinsport, instead of just toying with him at the Blue Whale in episode 3, hanging up the phone on him in episode 9, and then deftly evading his questions before showing him the door when Bill [paid] an unannounced visit to Burke’s hotel room in episode 21?
The above three episodes along with number 57 were all written by story creator and developer Art Wallace, which shows that already by September 1966 Dark Shadows was reinventing itself storywise to such a significant degree that contradictions in continuity would present themselves even if episodes in question were written by the same writer. Burke did acknowledge to Malloy in episode 45, a Francis Swann episode, that he’d been a fair employer to him when he was just starting out working on the boats of the Collins fleet; but in keeping with the opportunistic nature of Burke’s character, this was only after Malloy had offered to make a deal with him, which Burke must have surely understood would greatly benefit his own interests.
I think there is a bit more grounding in what we see for Burke’s rhapsody about Malloy in today’s episode than Masse gives the show credit for. Also, that it is misleading to suggest that only now are we seeing abrupt changes.
I’ll deal with the second of these points first. When Burke came to town in episode 1, he was cold to everyone. They retconned this aspect of his personality in episode 21, where he revisits the sets where he dealt some of his harshest snubs in #1 and is a hail-fellow-well-met even to people whom he had reason to avoid. That was a necessary revision. Soap opera writing is largely a matter of filling screen time with conversation, so a character who isn’t on speaking terms with anyone is useless. But it wasn’t a very well-motivated change in terms of what has happened in the story. Viewers who remembered episode 1 would have had a hard time explaining why Burke’s attitude is so different now.
This time, though, Art Wallace’s script makes it clear time and again that Burke is isolated and getting lonely. He had expected Sam to be his friend, but has learned that Sam fears him. Sam’s daughter Maggie listens sympathetically to him, but he’s a customer of hers, and that’s her job. He certainly can’t expect a social invitation to the Evans house. He thinks he might be able to join forces with the sheriff, but is lucky to get out of his office without a bail ticket. He arrived on the same train as Vicki, and was attracted to her from the first. Every time he sees her, he asks her out and she turns him down. When he finds out that Vicki will be having dinner with the Evanses, it makes the picture of his isolation complete. Burke hasn’t made a single friend all the time he’s been in town, and it’s getting to him.
This takes us back to Patrick McCray’s point, about the “incredibly vulnerable monsters whose only protection came from how unobservant everyone else was.” As time goes on and Dark Shadows becomes more and more a show for young children, it will often be laughable just how unobservant the human characters are. But the first of the incredibly vulnerable monsters will meet a family buffeted by hostility, suspicion, and blackmail, surrounded by enemies even inside the walls of their big dark house on the hill. He will present himself to the Collinses as a warm-hearted, charming, unworldly visitor from a foreign land who wants nothing but their friendship. The lonely people he meets will all but collapse into his arms. In Burke’s rhapsody about Bill, we see the same neediness at work.
We’ve been watching each episode of Dark Shadows on the 56th anniversary of its original broadcast. Today was the 56th anniversary of the broadcast of episode 56, so a milestone of sorts.
Word is making its way around the town of Collinsport that the Coast Guard has found the body of Bill Malloy, manager of the fishing fleet and cannery that between them employ most of the men in town and sustain the Collins family in their big dark house on the hill. In the opening, reclusive matriarch Liz is stumbling over her words trying to break the news of Bill’s death to her daughter Carolyn. The phone rings. Carolyn answers it, and gets the Coast Guard’s report. Liz is shattered.
Carolyn tells well-meaning governess Vicki that Bill’s body has been found. In episode 52, Carolyn had told Vicki that Bill was like a father to her. Carolyn, as played by Nancy Barrett, does indeed seem as upset in this scene as would someone who had just heard that her father’s body had washed up on shore. Vicki, as played by Alexandra Moltke Isles, is very calm and deliberate as she listens to Carolyn, letting her say what she has to say and emote as she needs to emote. It’s quite a well-turned bit of drama.
In the Blue Whale, Collinsport’s tavern, Liz’ ne’er-d-well brother Roger finds drunken artist Sam Evans, his co-conspirator in a long-ago crime. Sam tells Roger that the Coast Guard has found Bill’s body. Roger first takes a very lofty tone and announces that he will do whatever he must to ensure that Bill’s killer is brought to justice. After Sam asks him what he means by this, Roger coaches him on the lies the two of them should tell to ensure that neither of them is convicted of killing Bill.
Back at the great house on the estate of Collinwood, we see the Collins family album open to the page with the picture and name of Josette Collins. The last time we saw this was in episode 52, when the book opened to that page without the aid of any visible hands. Now we see that Carolyn is opening the book. That is followed immediately by the drawing room doors opening. That too has been the prelude to a ghostly apparition, but this time turns out to be Vicki’s doing.
The first few weeks, several characters used the word “ghosts” in metaphorical senses when talking with Vicki. Each time, she behaved as if they were talking about literal ghosts and said something like “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts!” To which they said that they damn well did believe in them, and that if she goes on living in the house at Collinwood for any length of time she will, too. Reminding us of ghostly manifestations and then showing mortal agency behind them harks back to this kind of open question. Art Wallace, who was the only writer credited on the first 40 episodes, is the writer today as well. Evidently he wants to remind us of the supernatural themes and to keep us guessing where they will take us.
Dark Shadows Commentary 