Tag: acting

Episode 50: He wasn’t there again today

This one is so good that I can’t resist going over it scene by scene. It has a wide variety of mood and image, tautly structured in a clearly told story, subtly realized by highly accomplished acting, and memorably presented in superb photography and imaginative sound design.

Well-meaning governess Vicki, out for a night-time stroll, makes her way to the crest of Widow’s Hill, where flighty heiress Carolyn stands looking down at the ocean swirling a hundred feet below. “Advance and be recognized! Friend or foe?” Carolyn challenges. Seeing Vicki, she remarks “Even the tutors are out tonight.”

Despite her whimsical greeting, Carolyn is in a low mood. She’s wondering at her own inability to take hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell’s desire to marry her seriously. She tries to interest Vicki in some of the ghost stories that surround the great estate of Collinwood, while the wind whips around the hill making the eerie sound known as “The Widows’ Wail.” Vicki stoutly insists on reducing all of Carolyn’s tales to psychology and asking her about her feelings. You can really see Nancy Barrett’s Carolyn trying to maintain a light tone despite her gloom, and in Alexandra Moltke Isles’ Vicki you can just as easily see a determination to cut through the nonsense and stick to what’s real, a determination fueled partly by her empathy for Carolyn and partly by her reflexive rejection of the weirdness of her new home in the old dark house.

In the house, troubled rich boy David Collins is complaining to his aunt Liz that the ghosts won’t let him sleep. Liz tells him to turn the lights on and chase them away. Unsatisfied by that response, David persists. Liz tells him that she has no time for him now and sends him to his room. Ten year old David Henesy trades these well-written lines with veteran movie star Joan Bennett as her professional equal. David Collins continually does nasty things to characters we like, refuses to take responsibility for any of his wrong-doing, and becomes violently surly when interrupted in his endless bouts of self-pity. He ought by rights to be a difficult character to take. But David Henesy finds something lovable in him, and brings that out clearly enough that he’s always a welcome presence on screen.

Vicki and Carolyn come to the house. Liz is disappointed they aren’t her ne’er-do-well brother Roger. Liz had ordered Roger to leave his desk at her company and come home early in the afternoon. She has questions about the disappearance of plant manager Bill Malloy, and about Roger’s lie that he hadn’t seen Malloy the night before. It’s well after 10 PM now, and no one has seen or heard from Roger since Liz called him.

Carolyn and Vicki have tea and try to take Liz’ mind off her worries, but without success. Liz scolds Carolyn for bringing up the ghost stories at a time when everyone is worried about Bill Malloy, but she can’t long keep herself from drifting off into the tale of the two women who died falling off the cliff, and the third who will someday follow them. That drifting, as Joan Bennett plays it, speaks volumes about Liz’ state of mind. She’s agitated about Bill Malloy, about Roger, about the possible connection between their two absences. That agitation gives way to hopelessness.

Roger comes home. Liz greets him with a demand for explanations. He responds with perfect insouciance, informing his sister, in whose house he lives as a guest and from whose business he draws a salary on her sufferance, that he is going to the kitchen to make a sandwich. Louis Edmonds’ delivery of Roger’s lines is brilliantly funny- we laughed out loud.

Liz most definitely does not see the humor. She has a brief scene by herself after he goes off to prepare his snack. All she does is watch him leave the foyer, turn, walk a few steps to the drawing room, and take a seat. With no dialogue and no mugging for the camera, she shows anger, disbelief, exasperation, and despair. It is a wonderfully economical performance, quite as extraordinary as is Edmonds’ comic turn preceding it.

In Vicki’s room, we see the word “death” scrawled on her mirror in all caps. Vicki enters, dragging David behind her. She demands to know who wrote it. He insists that the ghosts of the Widows did it. Vicki remarks that it is surprising that the Widows have the same handwriting as David. Carolyn enters, sees the word, and scolds David. Vicki silences Carolyn with a glance and asserts control of the situation. Only when Vicki threatens to tell Liz about the word does David erase it, though he still insists it was the Widows who wrote it, not him.

After David has left the room, Carolyn tells Vicki how horrid David is. Vicki perks up and makes a series of jokes about the Widows. She’s in such a chipper mood as soon as David is out of earshot that she must have been putting on an act presenting herself to him as angry. Much to Carolyn’s mystification, Vicki likes David and is confident that sooner or later she will make friends with him.

At another point in the series, this scene might have been padded out to fill a whole episode. Today, Art Wallace writes a quick and forceful interlude, showing us everything we need to know about what the three characters in it are like and where they stand in their relationships to each other, shedding some light on the idea of the ghosts of the Widows, then moving on to the next story point. The writing is as economical as the acting, and as absorbing.

Liz and Roger have a confrontation in the drawing room. Liz asks why Roger didn’t come home when she told him to. He tells her that he went to Bill Malloy’s cousins’ house to see if Bill had been there, and that he simply forgot to tell her he would be making the trip. This response is so unsatisfactory that it seems to double the anger with which Liz puts her next question- why did he lie to her when he denied having seen Bill Malloy last night? Roger tries to weasel out of answering that question, and does manage to get Liz to give him some information he can use to craft more plausible lies, but does not get himself off the hook.

The relationship between Liz and Roger is the first of Dark Shadows’ several relationships between a Bossy Big Sister and a Bratty Little Brother. In Liz and Roger’s case, they are literally older sister and younger brother; the most important such relationship will be a figurative one, between Julia and Barnabas. But it’s Liz and Roger who set the pattern. Roger’s impossible behavior in this scene is certainly among the finest examples of brattiness among all the little brothers, and Liz shows with crystal clarity the limitations of the power of the Bossy Big Sister when confronted with a truly horrid Bratty Little Brother.

Carolyn and Vicki come downstairs. They are going back to the crest of the hill to look for Carolyn’s wristwatch. Once they’ve left, Liz meets David at the top of the stairs. She tells David that they are looking for a wristwatch. “That’s not what they’ll find- they’ll find death” replies the boy. Last episode, David received the gift of a crystal ball; that marked the beginning of his career as a clairvoyant.

No sooner has the seer made his prediction than we hear Vicki screaming. Looking down from the cliff, she and Carolyn see a figure on the beach- a man face-down in the water. We hear the tide and the wind, sounds of nature on a large scale, and the immobile figure seems to represent something vast and inevitable.

Face down in the water, wearing an overcoat, with a flask in his back pocket
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Episode 27: In your room

Vicki tells Carolyn that David was the one who sabotaged Roger’s car, which Carolyn accepts as fact almost immediately. The story does build a foundation for Carolyn’s reaction- she repeatedly calls David a monster, and has been guilt-stricken at the thought that she let Burke into the house to commit the crime. But it is also the first example of what will become the hallmark of all of Nancy Barrett’s performances on the show. Her characters are the first to throw themselves into whatever is going on. She comes to serve as a one-woman chorus backing whoever happens to be the protagonist at the moment.

Liz still refuses to face the facts about David. When Vicki finds David’s Mechano magazine in her underwear drawer with the page about hydraulic braking systems marked, she and Carolyn see it as evidence that David had access both to the drawer and to the technical information he needed to commit the crime. Liz sees it differently, saying in a distant, ghostly voice “It was in your room, Miss Winters.”

Liz’ ghostliness is highlighted strikingly earlier in the episode. In the upstairs hallway, Carolyn is chattering away about ghosts, both the metaphorical ghosts of current problems resulting from past conflicts and the literal ghosts that, she would have you know, most definitely exist. Vicki looks at the door to the rest of the house which inexplicably opened and closed itself a few episodes back, and gasps as it opens again. This time it’s Liz coming out, having looked for David in the closed-off wing. Liz is impatient with the girls’ talk of ghosts, but her manner and appearance as she enters through that door are spectral.

The other setting in today’s diptych is a hotel room in Bangor.* Burke is meeting a private investigator there. He’s giving him a tough assignment. He wants more information about the Collinses in less time than the investigator had originally expected. He also wants the job done in absolute secrecy, and if the Collinses catch wind of the project the investigator will suffer dire consequences. The investigator is played by Barnard Hughes, a highly accomplished actor, and his skills are needed. Burke is being harsh and unreasonable, and the investigator is being deferential. Hughes is able to give his character enough texture that he seems to be keeping his dignity. Without that, Burke would have come off as a bully. The audience has to like Burke, so Hughes makes an important contribution to the show in this, his only appearance.

There’s an irony to Burke’s hard-driving intensity. He’s looking for information to hurt the Collinses, while the women at Collinwood have information far more damaging to the family than anything he’s sending his man to look for. So we’re in suspense as to what he’ll do when he catches up to them.

*In a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, “TD” points out that the hotel room in Bangor has a television set, the first such device we see on Dark Shadows. We will not see another until 1970. That one will be in a parallel universe. We never do see a TV set in the Collinsport of the main continuity.

Evidently Mr Bronson had the hotel send a TV up to his room.

Episode 24: Have you ever sat on a wrench?

The entire episode is set in the Collinsport Inn- the lobby, the restaurant, and Burke’s room.

In episode 21, Vicki took Liz in hand as if she were Plato’s Socrates and Liz were some pompous Athenian aristocrat, leading her through a series of simple, seemingly innocent questions to a most uncomfortable conclusion. That took place in the drawing room at Collinwood, while Carolyn watched. In episode 24, Carolyn joins Burke and the sheriff in Burke’s room. It’s Burke’s turn to play Socrates, Carolyn’s to answer the questions, and the sheriff’s to be an audience. Burke’s questioning is not only effective at raising doubts in the sheriff’s mind, but also prompts regular viewers to bracket Vicki and Burke together and see them as a likely, indeed inevitable, romantic pair.

The scenes in Burke’s room also highlight Roger’s bizarre folly in telling Burke his evidence against him before going to the police. We saw Vicki try to talk Roger out of this in two episodes, and the sheriff commented on it later. Watching the well-prepared Burke cross-examine Carolyn as effectively as any defense attorney, it is all the clearer that Roger’s behavior was driven not by any rational calculation, but by some wild impulse he cannot entirely control.

The scenes in the lobby and the restaurant show us a quiet rewriting of some characterizations laid out in episode 1. In that episode, Burke stood in the lobby and refused to admit that he so much as knew the name of Mr Wells, the hotel clerk, simply because Wells was from the town from which he was sent to prison ten years before. Now he stands on the same set, warmly greets one of the policemen who made the case against him, and repeatedly tries to persuade him to join him for lunch. Also in episode 1, Maggie stood behind the counter of the restaurant and told Vicki that she considers her, as a member of the staff of Collinwood, to be a “jerk” practically as bad as the family that owns the house. In this one, Carolyn herself comes into the restaurant and she and Maggie have a warm, cozy chat, like old friends.

I suppose it was inevitable that they would retcon Burke into a hail-fellow-well-met and Maggie into a friend of at least some of the Collinses. After all, soap operas consist mostly of conversation, so characters who aren’t on speaking terms with each other are dead weight. Placing these scenes on the same sets used in episode 1 is an emphatic way to make it clear to viewers who remember that episode that the change is intentional and permanent.

The videography is also as ambitious as we ever see it in this show. The camera tracks fluidly through the lobby, showing us more of that set than we see in any other episode, ending in a low angle shot of the sheriff that makes him look ominous. Some of those tracking shots are too much for Michael Currie, the actor playing the sheriff- during his scene alone with Burke, he bumps into one camera, stumbles into a piece of furniture, and then the other camera hits him in the back of the head. After that, he stands with his back to Burke and his elbows bent in front of him, looking for all the world like he is urinating on the floor:

Currie is so physically awkward that when Burke asks the sheriff the rhetorical question “Have you ever sat on a wrench?,” it seems to be a pretty near certainty that the answer is yes.

Currie has a rough time in this episode with his lines as well as with his movement. Perhaps the single funniest blooper comes when he declares that a good memory “is what I’m paid for,” then forgets his next line. It’s also interesting when he calls Burke “Burt.” Bloopers are after all one of the things Dark Shadows is known for, so we can’t be too annoyed with him for those. Worse is what happens when he does remember his lines. He intones them all as if he were leading the Pledge of Allegiance.

In the months after Mark Allen left the show, the standard of acting on it was remarkably high. Every actor other than Currie consistently turns in performances so strong that watching an episode feels like a fine evening at the theater. And bad as he is, even Currie doesn’t keep his scene partners from delivering good performances. He just wasn’t ready for professional acting. So I don’t have the same need to complain about him as about Allen, but he does deliver the series’ first laugh-out-loud moments of incompetence, and it is a relief when he is replaced.

Episode 20: A mockery to the future

In episode 18, Roger (Louis Edmonds) had demanded Vicki (Alexandra Moltke Isles) come with him to Burke’s hotel room, where they will tell Burke (Mitch Ryan) about all the evidence they have connecting him to Roger’s car wreck. Vicki repeatedly protests in that episode that it would be better to take this information to the police. In this one, they arrive at the hotel, and again Vicki objects that they really should be going to the police. Roger, however, is a man obsessed. He asks Vicki to wait in the restaurant while he goes to Burke’s room, telling her that it may not be necessary for her to join him.

Sam (Mark Allen) comes to the restaurant looking for his daughter Maggie. Finding that Maggie isn’t at work, he invites himself to Vicki’s table. Their previous encounter had been a strange and frightening one on the top of Widow’s Hill; Vicki is no more comfortable with Sam now than she had been then. He bellows at her, she reacts with quietly frosty disdain. These attitudes may have less to do with the script or the direction than with Mark Allen’s limitations as an actor; he bellows all of his lines in this episode, and quiet frostiness is as effective a technique as any other for holding onto the audience while sharing a scene with an incompetent loudmouth.

There’s no incompetence in the scenes in Burke’s room. Louis Edmonds and Mitch Ryan were first-rate stage actors, and their confrontation is a terrific fireworks display. When Roger brings Vicki up to tell Burke what she saw him do in the garage, she again plays the scene quietly, an effective counterpoint to the artillery blasts the men have been letting loose.

In the Evans cottage, Sam finds that Maggie (Kathryn Leigh Scott) has been home all this time. When Allen bellows at her, Scott bellows back at him, a far less effective tactic than the quiet intensity Mrs Isles had used earlier. The scene has some potential- the situation is that an alcoholic finds that his adult daughter has been checking up on him, he resents it, and they have a fight about all of the ways in which she has been forced to take on the parental role in their relationship. But as a shouting match, it might as well be about anything, or about nothing.

Returning home after their confrontation with Devlin, Roger and Vicki say goodnight in the foyer. Time and again in these early episodes, people have urged Vicki to leave Collinsport while she still can. Even in this episode, Burke had told her that. But as they part ways for the night, Vicki to her bedroom and Roger to the brandy bottle, Roger tells her that as a witness, “you can’t leave now.”

That line is effective enough, but if the scene between Sam and Maggie had worked it would have been very powerful. The Evanses, father and daughter, are a case of two people who are trapped, trapped in Collinsport, trapped with each other, trapped with his alcoholism and her sense of obligation to keep him alive. As written, the scene could have brought all that out, and induced a claustrophobic sense in the audience that would have made Roger’s line feel like a death sentence. As ruined by Mark Allen, it just leaves us with the sense that we’re watching a show that needs some recasting.

Episode 11: “‘Straight from the bean to you!’ I wonder who writes that junk.”

One of the great challenges of writing a serial is fitting enough recap of previous story points into each installment that new viewers can catch up without putting so much in that you bore the regulars. A time will come when Dark Shadows gives up recapping altogether, but in these early weeks they are scrupulous about soapcraft.

In episode 11, much of the recapping takes place in a scene between innkeeper Mr Wells (Conrad Bain) and drunken artist Sam Evans (Mark Allen.) The story justification for Mr Wells telling Sam everything the audience might need to know about Burke Devlin and the Collinses is that Sam’s daughter Maggie, who runs the restaurant in the inn, is about to return to work, and Mr Wells doesn’t want her to see her father drunk. He knows that as long as Sam thinks he might have something new to tell him about Burke, he will sit there and drink coffee.

The scene between Mr Wells and Sam is an example of something that becomes ever more important to Dark Shadows as it goes on: good acting trumping not-so-good writing. And good acting trumping bad acting- while Mark Allen is the worst actor on the show, Conrad Bain is phenomenally good. He single-handedly takes what must have looked in the script to be a terribly dull scene and makes it completely absorbing. I can imagine a show entirely composed of him looking into the camera and telling stories, and that show would be great. No wonder he went on to have such a big career in television!

Episode 603: Television Without Pity

In which I praise three accomplished solo performances- Joan Bennett playing opposite her own voiceover, Louis Edmonds playing opposite an empty room, and Alexandra Moltke Isles playing opposite Roger Davis. 

Episode 603: Television Without Pity