Well-meaning governess Vicki is determined to befriend her charge, problem child David Collins. In today’s episode, David throws a violent tantrum. Vicki looks genuinely frightened:
Meanwhile, David’s father, problem adult Roger Collins, has decided to charm Vicki so as to reduce the likelihood that she will testify against him. Roger walks in on David’s tantrum. After scolding the boy and letting him go, he talks sweetly to Vicki. She tells him that she will do anything she can to understand David. He invites her to a lobster dinner. We see David, who has been eavesdropping on his hated father making friends with his hated governess, looking troubled.
David confronts his father about what he heard. Roger responds with the same charm he showed Vicki, acknowledging that he has been difficult to live with, taking the blame for all of it, and promising to be a new man in the future. He agrees with all of David’s baseless accusations against Vicki, and says that the reason he was being nice to her a few minutes before was to disarm her against David. David says that he wants to frame Vicki for some terrible misdeed that will prompt reclusive matriarch Liz to fire her; Roger replies that he doesn’t want to know what David does about that matter. He asks the boy to consider which he wants more- to be rid of him, or rid of Vicki.
These are outstanding scenes. As Vicki and David, Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy both developed acting styles that built strongly on eye contact. Those styles mesh perfectly and produce an electric effect. As Roger, Louis Edmonds does everything well, but is peerless as a charming sophisticate. When Roger’s scene with Vicki begins, we don’t know that he has any especially sinister plans for her, so that scene plays as a pleasant interlude. We do know that Roger loathes David, so when we see him turning on the charm with his son, and especially when we see him agreeing with all sorts of statements from David that he knows to be false, the effect is alarming. By the time he is instructing David to keep him out of the loop when he acts against Vicki, Roger takes on a Satanic quality. His cold way of asking David his final question demonstrates that he knows David hates him and is unmoved by the fact. It’s heartbreaking to see David Henesy’s little face and imagine him as a child whose father shows that ultimate disregard for him, one of the bleakest endings of any episode in the entire series.
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.
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.
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.
Well-meaning governess Vicki and troubled rich boy David Collins are having breakfast in the kitchen at Collinwood. David had heard Vicki and his cousin Carolyn screaming outside the night before, and saw them running back to the house. He keeps badgering Vicki for an explanation of these events, which Vicki refuses to give. In his frustration, he accuses Vicki of trying to replace his mother, and tells her that when she dies, he won’t even go to her funeral.
Later in the episode, after David has overheard Vicki telling hardworking young fisherman Joe that she and Carolyn thought they saw a dead man on the beach, he has another scene with Vicki, this time in his room. She’s trying to teach him about the importance of rivers in the economic development of the USA. He continues to demand information about what happened last night. He resists answering her questions about North America’s rivers, she resists answering his questions about what she saw on the beach.
These scenes are full of repetitious dialogue, conversational dead-ends, and descriptions of the Mississippi-Missouri river system. They could have been quite dull. Thanks to the actors, they are engrossing. As David Collins, child actor David Henesy uses an utterly flat voice and affect, to which Alexandra Moltke Isles as Vicki responds with a nuanced slow burn. When David makes common-sense observations (e.g., “Was something chasing you?… Then why were you running?”) his flatness seems to be a sign of sober intelligence. When he says terrible things (“When you’re dead, I won’t even come to your funeral,”) the same flatness is far more disquieting than a display of anger would be. As Vicki very gradually loses patience with David, her eyes never leave his face for more than a second- we can see her searching for something she can empathize with, some opening hinting at a relatable emotion, and not finding it. The two of them are irresistible together.
Director John Sedwick deserves a lot of credit as well. We see Vicki and David in the kitchen and in David’s room, the two most intimate spaces on the show. In each of these spaces, David is sitting still while Vicki moves about. David’s stillness allows him to keep his voice perfectly level, while Vicki’s movements give her opportunities to show signs of the emotional reaction she’s trying to keep in check as she tries to be nothing but a conscientious teacher. The camera catches David’s crystal ball to emphasize the boy’s baleful preoccupations.
Reclusive matriarch Liz meets with dour handyman Matthew in the drawing room. Liz revisits the question of the dead man on the beach. She says that she doesn’t believe Matthew has ever lied to her; he vows he never will. Liz points out that Matthew chose his words carefully last night when he came back from searching the beach, and asks if there was in fact a dead body there. He admits that there was, that it was the body of missing plant manager Bill Malloy, and that he put Malloy’s body in the water and watched as the tide carried it out to sea Horrified, Liz asks what Matthew was thinking. All he will say is that he thought it was for the best. Liz calls the police.
In his scene with Liz, Matthew mentions that before he came to Collinwood to be the handyman he worked for Liz’ father on the fishing boats. I’ve seen several websites claiming this is an inconsistency, since in episode 6 Matthew had said that he was sweeping the floors in the Collins cannery when he was called up to the big house. Those could both be true, though. He might have been a fisherman who had to leave the boats for some reason and then took the job at the cannery.
Maybe the reason was Matthew’s personality. As Liz told Vicki in episode 13, Matthew is a “strange, violent man”- it’s easy to imagine him alienating the rest of the crew of a small boat to the point where they would refuse to set out with him on board. A history like that would go a long way towards explaining Matthew’s extreme gratitude to Liz for giving him a job, especially a job where he’s alone almost all the time.
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.
Bill goes to the restaurant and asks Maggie a bunch of questions about Sam. As he is getting ready to leave, Vicki comes in and Maggie asks her questions about Collinwood. When Vicki leaves, Sam comes in.
Joe goes to the Blue Whale and finds Bill day-drinking. As Joe is getting ready to leave, Sam comes in and he and Bill have a conversation about what Sam told Bill when he was about to pass out drunk. Joe then goes to Collinwood and talks to Vicki about Carolyn.
Vicki’s scenes are, strictly speaking, filler. Alexandra Moltke Isles seems to have known that her character was stuck in a dead end. She plays Vicki very brightly, with maximum excitement, as if she doesn’t get out much and is thrilled that people are paying attention to her. When Joe leaves, she stands in the foyer staring off into space, looking hopeless:
On the one hand, that’s a sign of bad things to come for Vicki. Her great story-line, her winning David’s friendship, is still to come, but once that is complete her character will go completely to waste.
On the other hand, Mrs Isles’ performance in this episode is the first example of a resource they will draw on to introduce all sorts of alarming characters into the cast. That resource is the keen loneliness of the residents of Collinwood. Several times people will turn up whom the Collinses ought by all rights to throw out on the street immediately, most notably a certain cousin from England who will present himself at the house next spring. But they are isolated in their big dark house, battered by hostility, stung by betrayal, and desperate to find someone they can trust.
Three people expressed surprise in episode 40 that Roger Collins wasn’t at his office. He still isn’t there today, and three more people are surprised. He finally decides to go in when Liz presents him with the alternative of looking for Carolyn.
Bill Malloy isn’t at work either, hasn’t been all day. He and Roger have been taking turns inviting themselves into Sam Evans’ house. Sam is also not working, and in fact takes time out of his busy schedule of downing one glass of whiskey after another to destroy the only thing we’ve seen him make as part of a paying job, a sketch of Burke. Maggie pieces the sketch back together- she’s also at home when she’s supposed to be working.
Telephones are unusually dynamic in this episode. Typically we see only one end of a phone call on Dark Shadows. This time, we cut back and forth between both ends of three telephone conversations this time. In the teaser Roger is browbeating Sam; Sam sets the phone down and walks off. While he gets another drink, the receiver is in the foreground and we hear Roger’s voice at the same volume as we did when Sam was listening. Sam comes back, returns the receiver to its cradle, and goes to sit down while it rings.
The bit when we see the phone and hear Roger’s voice, though Sam isn’t looking at the phone and can’t hear it, establishes the telephone as a character with its own relationship to the audience, independent of anyone who may or may not be paying attention to it. It’s a neat moment:
Liz calls the office and talks to Joe. Joe tells her Bill hasn’t been in all day. The stress in his voice, the papers piled on his desk, and the tight grip he has on the telephone receiver all make it credible that he’s the only person in town who showed up for work today:
Liz mainly wants to talk to Joe about Carolyn. Joe tells her he hasn’t talked to Carolyn in some time, and that he has no idea what if anything she is thinking about their relationship. While he breaks this news to Liz, we see him continue working, then cut back to the look of distress on Liz’ face.
Maggie calls Collinwood. Vicki answers and is excited to talk to Maggie. I guess the show is telling us they’re friends now. Maggie asks to talk to Roger. Vicki says Roger is probably in the office at this time of day, Maggie somehow knows he isn’t, Vicki remarks that he isn’t in the habit of confiding in her. Roger overhears this and asks “Is there any reason why I should confide in you?” When Vicki holds the receiver out to him and says Maggie Evans is on the line, he takes it and hangs up without so much as putting the receiver to his ear. Vicki and Roger then have one of their little quarrels.
That’s the only thing Vicki does in the episode. Her character is heading into a danger zone. Through the first eight weeks, she was on all the time. She was our representative, the outsider who knew nothing about the other characters or the town they live in, and to whom everything had to be explained. Now she knows as much about the rest of the characters as they know about each other, and we know as much as we want to learn by hearing explanations.
The major characters all have their secrets, but the only two who know each other’s secret are Roger and Sam. Vicki isn’t any likelier than anyone else to uncover that one. She has no secrets of her own, and her original story-line- her quest to discover her origins- is dead in the water. What’s more, Vicki is no good at lying. Soap operas are mostly conversation, and the big events on them are lies and the exposure of lies. The only time Vicki has tried to lie to anyone- in episode 13, when she told Matthew that Liz knew she was in his cottage- she was immediately found out, with disastrous consequences. If she’s going to stay relevant to the show, something is going to have to change, and fast. It’s fun to watch Alexandra Moltke Isles bicker with Louis Edmonds, but the characters they play need something meatier to bicker about.
This is the first episode credited to writer Francis Swann, indeed the first episode credited to anyone other than Art Wallace. Swann’s teleplay finds humor in the idea that so many people have taken the day off. Each time another character remarks on a case of absenteeism it gets that much closer to raising a chuckle. And Roger’s line that looking for Carolyn would require him to “neglect my vital tasks at the office… Dear me, no” is genuinely funny, especially as Louis Edmonds delivers it. The telephone scenes are also an innovation, and promise a new source of visual activity. Those favorable omens are offset by Vicki’s scene and its suggestion that her character is about to be allowed to wither on the vine.
A couple of the blogs I read when I prepare my comments made remarks about this episode with which I disagree. John Scoleri of Dark Shadows Before I Die says this of the quarrel between Sam and Maggie:
I know Sam gets frustrated with Maggie, but I’m beginning to wonder about their relationship. If he’s that close to hitting Maggie when he gets drunk, there’s no way I’m believing he hasn’t done that before.
It doesn’t look to me like Sam has hit Maggie. She’s inches from his face when he is at his angriest, yet she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t slump down, doesn’t show any sign of withdrawal or fear or anger or panic or sullenness or bewilderment or any other possible response to physical abuse.
There hasn’t been much happening on DARK SHADOWS in the last few weeks, but that doesn’t mean the show hasn’t been moving forward. There’s been a growing sense of doom throughout the show, and it’s obvious that someone is going to die. In this episode Sam rips up his portrait sketch of Burke Devlin, he and Roger lob threats at each other, Liz begins to draw Joe’s attention to his girlfriend’s romantic intentions on the family rival, and Victoria has been pushed around by just about everyone in the cast. In theory, any one of them is eligible for a ride in the bone wagon, but the show has been implying that Devlin is headed for a fall. It’s interesting that the show decides to go in another direction: I don’t know when Bill Malloy checks in at Eagle Hill Cemetery, but it’s probably sooner rather than later.
While it is true that “in theory, any one of them is eligible for a ride in the bone wagon,” I do think there’s a clear front-runner to be the first Dark Shadows character to be killed. It’s Sam who is obsessed with the fear of death, Sam whom Roger has threatened, Sam who left a mysterious sealed envelope to be opened in the event “something happens.” And, from an out-of-universe perspective, it’s Sam who has a daughter played by an appealing actress who needs a story-line. Maggie seeking revenge for the killing of her father would be just the plot to elevate Kathryn Leigh Scott from the bottom of the second string to the starting lineup where she so obviously belongs.
No other character has anyone so well-positioned to play avenger if they’re killed. The only keen attachment Bill Malloy has shown is his devotion to Liz, and in her scene with Matthew in episode 38 Liz demonstrated that she sees devotion from people outside the family as a tool to use when time comes to protect the good name of those inside it. So if she suspects Roger killed Bill, she won’t become Bill’s avenger- if she could order Matthew to throw away his own good name to cover up the truth about David, we can hardly expect her to expose Roger to redress Bill’s grievance against him. Indeed, when Bill is murdered, they will introduce an entirely new character to seek revenge for him.
Vicki is an orphan, who tells us in today’s opening narration that before she arrived at Collinwood she had never known a home. No one is likely to avenge her, and besides, she still does the opening narration for every episode- she’s supposed to be important, even if the writers can’t quite figure out what to do with her. Burke is supposed to be rich and powerful. Presumably he has friends, but we haven’t seen any of them. Joe is Mr Nice Guy and he’s mentioned a friend or two, but again, we haven’t seen them. The series story bible calls for Roger to die when Burke finally gets his revenge, but every time Louis Edmonds’ performance is the most interesting thing in an episode it becomes so much the less likely that they will ever get around to playing that scene. So the smart money, at this point, would be on Sam to be the victim in the first Dark Shadows murder. So much so, indeed, that it might not be surprising enough if it does happen- they may think they have to kill someone else to keep the audience engaged.
The actors all go big in this one. Marc Masse calls it “The David Ford Effect” and concentrates on Louis Edmonds’ thunderous performance in Roger’s confrontation with Liz, but since the entire cast has turned up the volume, I think it is more likely a response to direction coming from the people who hired David Ford (and, to be seen in a couple of days, Thayer David) than to David Ford himself.
Masse isn’t the only commentator who tends to ignore the directors and producers as influences on the acting. Perhaps that tendency goes back to an interview John Karlen gave in which he says that he doesn’t recall ever getting any direction at all on Dark Shadows. His first day, Lela Swift said “Go!” and that was it, he just did whatever he wanted for the next four years. On the other hand, Joel Crothers said that he left the show because the directors were so busy with special effects they no longer had any time to work with actors, implying that they had worked with them at one point. Since Crothers was there from the beginning and Karlen joined the cast ten months in, I can only assume that it was during these first months that the directors told the actors what they wanted.
Why would Lela Swift and the other masterminds behind the scenes start hiring actors like David Ford and Thayer David and tell the existing cast members to start hamming it up at this point? Well, the saga of the bleeder valve has wrapped up, and there is no other story going on that wasn’t there in episode 1. Some of those stories are starting to look pretty pointless. There’s “The Revenge of Burke Devlin”- they haven’t told us what exactly he wants revenge for, but if he ever takes it we will see either the death of Roger, which would have the disastrous effect of requiring Louis Edmonds to leave the show, or Burke taking control of the Collins family assets, which will bring the equally disastrous requirements of a showing a bunch of episodes about various forms of debt and building a new set for Joan Bennett to play her scenes on. So we’re starting to suspect that Burke will just keep going in circles. Roger’s angry scene with Sam in this episode is fun to watch because Edmonds and Ford play well off each other, but as part of The Revenge of Burke Devlin story it doesn’t take us to any new ground.
There’s “Vicki Seeks Her Origin.” We might expect that one to lead somewhere, eventually, but if that happens it won’t be for a good while. In this one, Vicki tells Liz that she’s decided she can’t help David and replies to Liz’ plea with her to stay with “Why am I so important?” She doesn’t renew her inquiries into how Liz knew about her and why she hired her. Of course not- that was getting tedious. So Alexandra Moltke Isles and Joan Bennett just emote furiously while exchanging lines that don’t add up to much.
We don’t see Carolyn or Joe in this one, but their romance is another dead end. Joe is a nice guy who wants to get married, Carolyn is a rich girl who doesn’t. There aren’t that many ways to make a story out of that.
The one story that works in the first 42 weeks is the growing friendship between Vicki and David. Right now there isn’t much to do with that one, either. David has just been caught trying to murder his father- he isn’t going to be particularly reachable. Today, he openly threatens Vicki at the beginning of the episode, then comes out of hiding after Liz persuades her to stay and declares that he doesn’t want her to stay. We have to see them at rock bottom today for the gradual rise in the months ahead to grip us the way they will, but not a lot happens while you’re at rock bottom.
So, maybe the producers and directors decided to dial the acting up to 11 because they knew they didn’t have much of a story to tell. This is Art Wallace’s final week as the sole credited writer on the show; I don’t know how much help he had in those first eight weeks, how much involvement he really had in episodes attributed to him in the nine weeks after, and whether anyone is already around whose name will be printed on the screen in that period. But they don’t have a story to tell right now. So it falls to the cast to distract us while they wait for the next phase.
David Ford joins the cast as Sam Evans, replacing the woeful Mark Allen. Ford was always one of my favorites. He was one of the reasons I started watching the show when it was on the Sci-Fi channel in the 90s- I remembered him from one of my favorite movies, the musical 1776, where he plays John Hancock.
Marc Masse made a point in his Dark Shadows from the Beginning that I hadn’t thought of before. I’d always thought of Thayer David as the founder of the Dark Shadows house style of acting (“Go back to your grave!”) That isn’t wrong, as we will see when Thayer David joins the cast next week. But David Ford made a much bigger contribution than I realized. Several members of the cast, especially Louis Edmonds and Nancy Barrett,* tend to play their roles in a big, stagy manner, but Ford represents a step beyond them.
Masse writes:
To this point Dark Shadows has been written, directed, and acted solely as a vehicle for television.
Here in episode 35, the style of acting on Dark Shadows takes a theatrical turn with the debut of David Ford, who, with one grand and sweeping wave of the arm and eloquent turn of phrase, will single-handedly transform the acting approach from that of a standard television show to that of a teleplay:
“A façade, my dear boy!”
You have to wonder if that line was an ad lib; it fit in perfectly with the gesture, and thus far Art Wallace has never written with such a fanciful flourish.
Masse also gives some very interesting information about what Ford was doing when he landed the role of Sam Evans, information that points towards an approach to casting that will become a marked feature of the show in the years ahead:
In the year preceding Dark Shadows, Ford was performing on the Hartford Stage in a successful production of the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the role of Big Daddy. That’s why when he first appears on Dark Shadows he has that half a beard type style, having fashioned his performance of Big Daddy after the one made famous in the 1958 motion picture adaptation, especially the way he scrunches up his eyes for the effect of dramatic intensity, giving it his best Burl Ives.
There is indeed a good deal of Burl Ives in today’s iteration of Sam, enough that we can assume that Ford was hired in part as a Burl Ives imitator. In future years, we’ll see Jonathan Frid, who looks like Bela Lugosi and walks and talks like Boris Karloff, playing a character who is a mashup of Lugosi’s Dracula and Karloff’s Imhotep.** And Jerry Lacy, who was most famous for his Humphrey Bogart imitation, and whose first role on the show was as a Bogart-inflected lawyer. And David Selby, who, if you listen to him with your eyes closed, you’d swear was Joseph Cotten. And Roger Davis, who Joan Bennett famously described as show business’ answer to the question “What would Henry Fonda be like if he had had no talent?” Ford is the first of that company of mimics, and among the best.
This is also the first episode where Carolyn and David have a scene together, rather odd considering we’ve had 34 episodes mostly set in the house where they are two of the five residents. Carolyn can’t stand the boy to start with, and in this one she’s just found out he tried to murder his father, her beloved uncle Roger. Besides, she’s in a bad mood because Joe called her up and told her he found Vicki in Burke’s hotel room. So they have a shoving match, she tells him he’s a monster, etc. Nancy Barrett and David Henesy ham these scenes up so grandly that it’s hard to imagine why they haven’t been on camera together before, it’s tremendous fun.
This is a bad episode for Alexandra Moltke Isles. Carolyn is nasty to Vicki about Burke, then apologizes and gets mad at herself, all while Vicki stands perfectly still with a smile plastered on her face. Vicki’s own lines are patronizing and inappropriate, starting with “Carolyn, you idiot” and going downhill from there. When Carolyn makes the painful admission that she has a tendency to grab for everything, Vicki delivers a smugly sanctimonious “That’s a good way to end up with nothing.” At the end of the episode, Vicki has a brief confrontation with David, which Mrs Isles plays well enough, but there isn’t much to it.
I think Mrs Isles’ technique was to start with the emotions the character was supposed to be feeling and to project those through whatever dialogue she is given. That’s served her well so far. Dark Shadows was her first professional acting job, and she fits right in with old pros like Joan Bennett and Broadway up-and-comers like Mitch Ryan. But she’s just awful in these scenes. My guess is that she couldn’t figure out what Vicki was feeling or thinking, since no one would do or say the things she does or says in today’s show, and so she just tried to stay out of Nancy Barrett’s way. Or maybe she read the script, thought Vicki was being an ass, and decided to play the character in the most asinine way possible. Either way, I winced to see it.
*Both natives of Louisiana. I doubt that means anything, but as the series goes on and gradually loses all interest in creating an illusion of being Down East someplace near Bar Harbor, I get more and more interested in the geographical origins of the actors. I’ll try to confine that topic to footnotes for the next three years, but when we hear David Selby’s voice we’re going to talk about the idea of a New England Brahmin with a West Virginia accent.
**Imhotep is the title character from The Mummy. Originally I was going to say that Frid moves and sounds “like Boris Karloff’s Mummy,” but that rather overstates the feminine side of his role.
Dark Shadows Commentary 