Tag: alexandra moltke

Episode 23: The dignity of my badge

Roger has finally deigned to notify the police of his suspicion that Burke Devlin tampered with his brakes in an attempt to kill him. In story time, that was twelve hours ago. In the interim, both Roger and Bill Malloy have gone to Burke’s room and told him everything they know and think they know. Roger presented Burke with Vicki and her testimony. The newspaper has run a front-page story about it.

The sheriff is peeved that Roger is bringing him into it only now. Roger explains that his goal in giving Burke all the evidence in advance of any investigation was to persuade him to leave town, but that he never had the opportunity to present that idea to Burke.

Upstairs, Vicki is trying to teach David a lesson about the history of Maine. Considering that we learned in episode 13 that Vicki has never heard of Augusta, the capital of the state, it’s difficult to be optimistic about that instruction. But every scene between David and Vicki in his room is worth watching. No matter what lines they may be required to say, David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles always use body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and spatial position to convey the emotions appropriate to their characters. As episode follows episode, those emotions shift from wild hostility on David’s part and patient solicitude on Vicki’s to genuine affection and trust. It’s the one story-line that really works in the first 42 weeks of the show.

David made some incriminating remarks to Vicki and his aunt the night of his father’s wreck; they both thought he was simply expressing his guilt over his hostility to his father. In this one, he asks Vicki if she ever tried to kill anyone. She tells a story of some fist-fighting she did at the Hammond Foundling Home, and says that’s as close as she got. She looks happy telling David that story, not because it’s a happy story, but because it’s a chance to make a connection.

She isn’t happy at the end of the episode- when David grabs at the bleeder valve and the other adults ignore his action, we see it dawn on her that he is the culprit.

I had a lot to say about this episode in the comments section of John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die. Here it is:

I don’t agree that Constable Carter seems intelligent. He greets David by asking his name. If a cop has been on the job for over ten years in Collinsport, a town under the shadow of a big house called Collinwood, home of the the Collins Cannery and the Collins Fishing Fleet, and he still doesn’t know the four members of the Collins family, he’s an idiot.

Of course, he is sensible when he’s demanding to know why Roger waited twelve hours before coming to him and expressing incredulity at Roger’s visit to Devlin. Characters in soaps and suchlike productions are always declaring they have to do their own investigations before they can go to the police, and often this is treated in the story as if it were a reasonable thing to do. But every step of the way they’ve lampshaded the preposterousness of it. Vicki kept telling him it was a bad idea before he did it, last episode Sam reacted scornfully when he told him what he repeats to the constable here, that he wanted to give Devlin a chance to leave town and never come back. And the constable shows the same scorn for the idea today.

Those scenes make Vicki, Sam, and the constable look smarter than Roger, but we’ve seen enough of Roger to know that he isn’t a fool. Something is clouding his judgment, something more complicated and slipperier than the stories that have been suggested to us so far. Roger is hiding more than one thing, and he doesn’t trust himself with his own secrets.

David looks at the camera again today, when he’s eavesdropping on the conversation with the constable. An effective tactic- we the audience know what he knows, and he seems to be pleading with us to keep quiet.

Another meaningful look at the end of the episode. When the constable, who is an idiot, says cheerfully that now we’ll know how David’s fingerprints got on the wrench, Vicki gives David a grim little glance. Just for a second- but not only is it the last moment of the episode and therefore emphatic, it is also the second time we’ve seen her give David that look. The first time was in his room, when he was betraying himself with some remarks about how terrible it would be to go to prison. We can see a terrible idea starting to form in the back of Vicki’s mind.

Episode 21: “Carolyn’s mother is a witch.”

In the teaser, Carolyn asks Vicki what’s on her mind. “The meaning of life?” “No, just the opposite- death.” Exchanges like that go a long way towards explaining the appeal the show has to depressives. Casting makes a difference, too- actresses Nancy Barrett and Alexandra Moltke Isles seem to be far from death-obsessed, so they can deliver the most preposterously gloomy lines without boring the audience.

After the first break, Vicki and Carolyn are having breakfast in the kitchen. As it always does, that set creates an intimate atmosphere which makes it seem natural that the characters should share confidences. Carolyn confesses her feelings of guilt at having brought Burke to the house; Vicki confesses that she doesn’t believe Burke tampered with Roger’s brakes. For some reason, Vicki tells Carolyn that when she was six years old, an attendant at the foundling home played a prank and told her that her birth parents would be coming for her. All of Vicki’s stories about her childhood are like that, it’s no wonder she feels at home in Collinwood.

There’s a scene between Bill Malloy and Burke in Burke’s room. It’s always interesting to see actors as talented as Mitch Ryan and Frank Schofield playing off each other. It is puzzling that a Collins family retainer as loyal and intelligent as Bill would go to Burke before the police have a chance to question him or search his room and tell him everything he knows and suspects about the crime. But Roger has already tipped his hand to Burke, so another indiscretion isn’t going to damage the prospects of the prosecution by much. This scene, in which Burke is eating breakfast while Bill is confronting him with his suspicions, is intercut with the scene in which Vicki and Carolyn are eating breakfast and consoling each other. So, opposite extremes- former friends in a hostile setting, new friends in a nurturing setting.

Carolyn tells Liz that Vicki doesn’t think Burke is guilty. Liz responds that she doesn’t “care what Miss Winters thinks.” Liz then collapses into pity for Carolyn and guilt about herself as a mother. She remembers that when Carolyn was a child, she would come home from school crying because the other children taunted her, saying that “Carolyn’s mother is a witch.”

That’s an interesting story, because it implies that Carolyn went to the school in town. How did she get there? It’s much too far to walk. Did a school bus come up the hill to Collinwood to pick her up and drop her off? That’s a bit hard to imagine. Liz doesn’t want anyone around the place. Sooner or later, some adventurous child would slip off the bus with Carolyn and go exploring the grounds, no doubt finding a way into the house itself. Roger didn’t live there until recently, and Liz has never set foot outside the grounds since Carolyn’s birth. The only servant on the estate is Matthew, and he and Carolyn are not at all close, not as they would be if he’d taken her to and from school every day in her childhood.

That leaves Bill Malloy. He comes to the house more or less daily to go over business with Liz- perhaps he used to combine those visits with picking Carolyn up for school and dropping her off afterward. He is very close to her, calling her “Princess.” He’d have to pick her up very early in the morning, since his responsibilities involve supervision of the fishing boats. She might still have been in her pajamas. She’d have needed to get dressed and have breakfast at Bill’s house. We learn later that he has a housekeeper who has been with him many years; much, much later, that housekeeper will reminisce with Carolyn about brushing her hair for her when she was a little girl. So maybe that was it…

Vicki talks with Liz and Carolyn about the private investigator Burke has hired to look into her background. Liz doesn’t want to talk about anything that touches on how she heard about Vicki and what she knows about her, but by a skillful line of Socratic questioning, Vicki leads Liz to the conclusion that something about her origins might be embarrassing to someone associated with Collinwood. Liz walks out of the room, as Euthyphro walks out when Plato’s Socrates springs a similar trap for him, and we can see how smart and determined Vicki is.

Scenes that focus on the question of Vicki’s origins tend not to get much attention from fandom, perhaps because the whole story-line ultimately fizzled out with no resolution. But watching it forward, not thinking about what comes later, we can see some strong scenes devoted to it.

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 15: I think he’s beginning to trust me

I left two comments about this episode on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die. A long one about its place in the overall development of the show’s stories:

This is a vitally important episode. The scene in David’s room is the first of many in which David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles act their way out of weak writing to establish a relationship between two characters who can always make a connection with each other. Their body language, tones of voice, etc, triumph over some remarkably tedious dialogue to show us what people look like when they’re starting to trust each other. The growth of that relationship is really the only story that works in the first 42 weeks of the show. The big events involving characters we’ve only heard about or who will soon be recast matter insofar as they represent developments in that story, and other events don’t matter at all.

The scene that Liz and Roger play out in the drawing room while Vicki and David are talking upstairs is important in its own way. That these conversations are going on simultaneously is an example of the mirroring of Vicki and Liz that is such a strong motif in the first 42. Vicki is open and uncomplicated as she tries to talk David down from his superheated hostility to his father; Liz is guarded and double-minded as she tries to talk Roger back up to fear of Devlin. In the contrast between the two women, we see the difference between the innocent one with no past, and the frightened one with nothing but a past.

The contrast between father and son plays out in those scenes, and also in the two brief scenes between them. Roger’s narcissism renders him utterly childish, making no effort to take his son’s feelings into account or to understand Devlin’s motives. David’s fear and pain drive him to mimic adult behavior with absurd and indeed horrifying results. Liz tries to make Roger grow up, as Vicki tries to free David to be a child, but Roger’s inability to take anyone’s feelings but his own seriously dooms both efforts.

The moments between Liz and Vicki call for comment. Later on in the series, these characters will be stuck in many frustrating scenes where they inexplicably fail to pass on information that would resolve story points. At first glance, Vicki’s failure to tell Roger about Burke’s presence in the garage and Liz’s failure to pass the word of it on to him after Vicki tells her may seem to be the first of those failures. But Vicki has no reason to trust Roger, and very little to suspect Burke of wrongdoing. On what she’s seen of Roger so far, she can only assume that if she tells him what she saw he will jump to the most sinister possible conclusion and enlist her in his mad campaign against Burke. Liz seems relatively reasonable, at least on the topic of Burke Devlin, so by telling her Vicki is both satisfying an obligation and reducing the likelihood that she will be a party to slander. Indeed, Liz and Vicki tell each other quite a bit about themselves, much more than they will later on.

And a short one about a point that bothers many viewers:

Oh, and Liz’s failure to repeat Vicki’s news to Roger isn’t a problem. Liz is deeply preoccupied, and Vicki’s report wouldn’t be particularly interesting to anyone who hadn’t been watching the show.

Episode 14: We’re all pals again

We see David looking for a place to hide a small metal valve. He settles on Vicki’s underwear drawer. She catches him going through it; he runs off, and she finds nothing missing. She would apparently rather not think about what he was doing in that particular drawer. Later, he will claim that he was trying to slip a present into the drawer- a seashell, at first; then, a magazine.

Alone in the upstairs hallway, Vicki sees the locked door to the closed-off part of the house open and close, apparently by itself. At first, she thinks it’s David playing a prank on her, but he comes out of his room so soon after that there doesn’t seem to be any way he could have done it. The show has been using the idea of ghosts in episode after episode to suggest that something big is about to happen; now, for the first time, we see an event that is either a supernatural manifestation or an elaborate, Scooby Doo-esque hoax perpetrated by some unknown person for some unknown reason. So what she’s doing now- looking for David, trying to figure out what he’s been up to- is directly connected to something that is disturbing the supernatural back-world of Collinwood. It may be a while before the back-world erupts into the foreground, and even longer before it crowds out everything else and becomes the whole show. But that little valve represents the first irretrievable step on the path that will lead to what Dark Shadows became.

This is also the first episode in which Vicki gets to make someone laugh. Carolyn says that she and Joe will probably go to a movie, because “What else is there to do in this town?” To which Vicki replies “You could get into a fight in a bar.” It’s also the last episode in which Vicki is allowed to make a joke. Humorlessness one of the things that will eventually squeeze the life out of the character. Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers her one good joke well enough that it clearly could have been otherwise. Those of us who wish Vicki had stayed at the center of the show all the way through can’t help but feel sad that it wasn’t to be.

Episode 6: “Winters! Victoria Winters!”

Looking for David in the basement of Collinwood, Vicki encounters caretaker Matthew Morgan. No one has bothered to tell Matthew that a new person will be coming to the house, so he assumes she is a burglar and confronts her accordingly. Liz shows up, telling Matthew that Vicki belongs in the house and telling Vicki that she doesn’t belong in the basement.

In week one, Liz refused all requests for information about who Vicki was and why she hired her to be David’s governess. But at least she had told the other members of the household that Vicki would be coming. She hasn’t told even that to Matthew, notwithstanding the fact that, as she will explain to Vicki in this episode 13, Matthew is a “strange and violent man.” By taking the job and living in the house, Vicki, our point of view character, has made herself dependent on Liz; we the audience are also dependent on Liz, in that the stories in these first months all revolve around actions Liz will or won’t take. So it’s doubly unnerving that she is so very stingy with information.

George Mitchell, who plays Matthew here and in his next few appearances, is the sort of actor we often see in the first 42 weeks of the show. He is essentially a miniaturist, who builds a character one finely etched mannerism at a time. His successor in the role, Thayer David, worked at the opposite extreme, becoming the first exponent of the Dark Shadows house style of acting (often called “Go Back to Your Grave!” because of Lara Parker’s explanation of it.) Without that style, the show wouldn’t have become what it did in the period which people remember, so I can’t regret the recasting. But I do wish we could somehow see what it would have been like had George Mitchell carried the character through his whole arc of development. He could have played something I think Art Wallace could have written, a closely observed, sensitively explored psychological study.

There’s another what-might-have-been moment when Vicki tries to make friends with Matthew. He introduces himself to her with a gruff “Morgan! Matthew Morgan!” To which she replies, mimicking his down-east accent, “Wintahs! Victoria Wintahs!” It isn’t much of a joke, and Matthew isn’t amused. But it’s hard not to wonder what Vicki might have become if she’d been allowed to make the occasional joke as the series went on.

Episode 4: Frightening a new friend

Here’s the comment I left on the Scoleris’ Dark Shadows Before I Die blog entry about this episode:

Interesting how the early episodes tiptoe towards the supernatural. Burke, Roger, and Carolyn all use the word “ghost” metaphorically, to refer to unresolved conflicts from the past that are still causing problems in the present. Liz and Vicki, each in her turn, responds by saying there are no such things as literal ghosts, only to hear the first person assert that there absolutely are. Giving this same little conversation to both Liz and Vicki is one of the ways the show tries to establish Liz and Vicki as mirrors of each other, of presenting Liz’s current life as a possible future for Vicki and of Vicki as a revenant of Liz’s past.

The sobbing sounds Vicki hears in this one are the first occurrences that would have to be explained as the act either of a ghost or of someone trying to make Vicki believe there are ghosts. The next such moment will come in episode 14, and there will be several more in the weeks and months ahead. This tiptoeing is what the Dark Shadows wiki on fandom tracks as “Ghostwatch.”

In view of the near-sexlessness of the later years of the show, it’s striking how frank this one is. Roger’s aggressiveness towards Victoria is plainly sexual. Liz catches him trying to sneak into Victoria’s bedroom, he derides her attempt to regulate his “morals.” He offers Victoria a drink, they talk about pleasure and pain in words that so clearly about sex that they barely qualify as sens double. Indeed, that is the only moment in the whole series when Victoria seems like what she’s supposed to be, a street kid from NYC. And the flirtation between Uncle Roger and his niece Carolyn is so blatant that it’s a wonder how Louis Edmonds and Nancy Barrett keep the scene from making the audience either laugh or feel ill.

A story idea: Adam in New York

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

In a number of these comments, I explained particular ways I had of correcting Dark Shadows in my head while I watched it. I rarely bothered telling people about times when I didn’t notice bloopers because I had put the words in the right order while hearing them, or other small corrections. I did mention times when I thought out major changes. Many of those changes could only be called fanfic.

Perhaps the most ambitious piece of fanfic I shared there, and certainly the longest, was my response to the show’s failure to resolve the story of Adam, the Frankenstein’s monster-like creature. My idea, if presented at the right time, would also have tied up the show’s most embarrassing loose end:

Here’s an idea I had today for a story that would save Vicki.

It would be a TV movie airing late in 1969. Start with a prologue set in Collinwood at that time. Adam returns, looking for Barnabas and Julia. He’s very well-spoken and accomplished now, but still socially awkward, still prone to fits of anger, and in need of help to get papers that he needs to establish a legal identity.

He finds that Barnabas and Julia are gone. He also happens upon some mumbo-jumbo that dislocates him in time and space.

It plops him down in NYC in 1945. With his facial scars, everyone assumes he’s a returning GI injured in the war. He meets a young woman, supporting herself by work at a magazine about handheld machines, trying to establish independence from her wealthy family back in Maine. This woman, played by Alexandra Moltke Isles, is Elizabeth [Collins.]*

Adam and Elizabeth slide into a love affair. She has another boyfriend, a dashing young naval officer named Paul Stoddard. Elizabeth is frustrated with both Adam and Paul; Adam refuses to talk about his background, and while Paul says many words when asked about himself, he doesn’t really give significantly more information than Adam does. Paul is slick, charming, and familiar with all the most fashionable night spots, but he does show signs of a nasty side. Besides, he rooms with a disreputable young sailor named Jason McGuire who keeps turning up at the most disconcerting moments.

For his part, Adam is sincere, passionate, and attentive, but given to quick flashes of anger. He’s just as quick to apologize and sometimes blubbers like a giant baby with remorse for his harsh words, but he’s so big and so strong that when he is carried away in his fits of anger Elizabeth can’t help but be afraid of him. Besides, he’s not a lot of fun on a Saturday night. He doesn’t have a nickel to his name, and his idea of an exciting weekend is an impromptu seminar on Freud’s TOTEM AND TABOO, followed by a couple of games of chess.

Elizabeth’s mother, played by Joan Bennett, comes to town. Mrs Collins is appalled by Adam’s scars, impatient with his refusal to discuss his background, and contemptuous of his obvious poverty. Paul’s effortless charm and sparkling wit, packaged in the naval dress uniform he makes sure he’s wearing when she first sees him, fit far more tidily into her vision of a son-in-law. Mrs Collins presses her daughter to spurn Adam and pursue Paul, and for a time Elizabeth tries to comply with her wishes.

Yet she cannot forget Adam. Paul realizes this, and sees his chance at an easy life slipping away. We see him in a dive in Greenwich Village telling Jason McGuire that Elizabeth and her inheritance are going to end up with the scar-faced scholar. He and McGuire review Adam’s weaknesses, and decide they can exploit Elizabeth’s concern about his temper. They trick her into believing that Adam is on the run from the law, having beaten his wife to death. They lead her to believe that it’s just a matter of time before his occasional verbal outbursts give way to physical abuse, and that when that happens it will be too late- he will kill her. Believing this, Elizabeth gives Paul another chance, but still cannot break things off with Adam.

Adam does not know what Paul and Jason have led Elizabeth to believe. He knows only that she has become distant from him, and that she is still seeing Paul. He becomes angry and shouts at Elizabeth. He reaches for an object; she believes it is a blunt instrument with which he will kill her. In a moment of panic, she grabs a gun she has been studying for an article the magazine has assigned her to write and shoots him. As he lies motionless on her floor, she discovers that he wasn’t reaching for a weapon at all- he was reaching for a love letter that he had written to her. She realizes that he was no threat to her, that she has shot him for no reason.

She flees to Paul and Jason’s apartment, telling them that she has killed Adam. Paul calms her and promises to take care of matters so that she will not be suspected of any crime. Paul and Jason go to her apartment and find it empty. There are bloodstains on the carpet where Adam fell, and a trail of bloodstains leading down the hallway out the front door. They follow the stains and find Adam nursing a serious, but clearly not fatal, wound. They lead Adam back to Elizabeth’s apartment. They draw on their naval training to remove the bullet, clean and dress the wound. After a conversation. Adam admits that there is no point in his pursuing Elizabeth, and he agrees to leave town. Paul gives Adam some money and promises to tell Elizabeth that he is all right and that he doesn’t hold a grudge. Adam shakes Paul’s hand and leaves.

Paul and Jason clean the bloodstains. They then return to their own apartment. On the way they exchange a look that begins as nervous, and ends with two broad grins. Elizabeth asks why they were away so long. They tell her that it takes quite a while to dispose of a corpse. She sobs. Paul holds her.

Paul and Elizabeth announce their engagement. A few weeks later, the doctor informs Elizabeth that she is pregnant. The child must be Adam’s. Paul is not interested in raising any child, and certainly not interested in splitting the estate with a child not even his own. He orders Elizabeth to give the baby up. She refuses. He points out that she wouldn’t be able to do much mothering if she were in prison for murder. She sobs. In the final scene, we see Elizabeth outside on a snowy day, holding a basket and writing a note. In voiceover, we hear the contents of the note: “Her name is Victoria. I cannot take care of her.”

*Originally I wrote “Stoddard” here.

My usual themes: Alexandra Moltke Isles, David Henesy, and other underrated actors

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. A number of times I argued that Danny and other contributors to the discussion threads were unduly harsh in their assessments of various actors on Dark Shadows, especially Alexandra Moltke Isles (who played Victoria Winters) and David Henesy (who played David Collins and various other members of the Collins families.)

I argue that Mrs Isles and Mr Henesy were the best thing about the first 42 weeks of the show:

I always liked Alexandra Moltke Isles; her scenes with David are not only the only things that work in the first two hundred episodes, they are also the purest example in the whole series of performers overcoming weak writing. Even when the scene begins with David accurately describing something that we, and Vicki, saw happen a few moments before and Vicki replying “That’s! Not! True!,” the two of them still manage to display deep enough emotions to carry us through. Her relatively quiet style doesn’t give her much scope as the show goes on and the “Go back to your grave!” school of acting becomes mandatory, but she always makes the most of whatever chances she has.

Nor are her performances in the first 42 weeks of the show all I find to praise in Mrs Isles’ work. I say that she made the most of the few opportunities the scripts gave her in the period of the show I call “Monster Mash” (episodes 466-626):

I’m not at all sure you’re being fair to Alexandra Moltke. She turns in some nice little performances in her scenes in this part of the series. She’s arrestingly fierce in her confrontations with Cassandra-lique, and in the confusion of her references to what she kind of remembers from 1795 she finds a kind of music. Each time she brings up her half-memory that the original Barnabas never went to England, but died in 1795, it’s a theme that resonates a little differently with everything else around it. Yes, Vicki was a dead-end character after the end of the Phoenix storyline, but I do wish the Countess had done a bit more screen acting.

Furthermore, I wish Vicki and Adam had a number of scenes together. The only thing that worked in the first 209 episodes was the relationship between Vicki and David, a theme crowned by the Phoenix storyline. Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy made it work because they are both actors who excel at precisely crafted, quietly realized little scenes, and it was in scenes of that sort that the story of David learning to trust Vicki moved forward. When the vampire comes in and the overwrought style of acting (“Go back to your grave!”) takes over, the show doesn’t have room for many scenes like that. So often Isles and Henesy seem like chamber violinists trying to accompany a heavy metal band. Robert Rodan is of the same type.

As I say above, I believe Isles found a way to have an impact on a heavy metal concert with her chamber violin, and the others did as well. But it would have been satisfying in a different way if the chamber musicians had been paired with each other on a regular basis. Scenes with Vicki helping Adam could have been as compelling as the first season scenes of Vicki giving David his lessons were, as could scenes of David interacting with Adam.

I amplified my point about the Phoenix storyline (a.k.a. “Meet Laura,” episodes 126-192) here:

I liked the original Phoenix storyline… it was the payoff of the only thing that worked in the first 210 episodes, which was the development of a friendship between Vicki and David. The scene on the cliff, when David is clutching Vicki while Vicki urges him to go to Laura, is among the most emotionally powerful in the whole series because it shows us how far this development has come.

I wasn’t Mrs Isles’ only defender in the comment threads. Another commenter suggested a doozy of a rewrite of the “Meet Another Angelique” storyline (episodes 969-1060, also known as “1970 Parallel Time) in which Mrs Isles would play the villain and Lara Parker the damsel in distress, reversing their roles from the original “Meet Angelique” storyline (episodes 365-466, set in the year 1795.) Several people, including me, replied to that suggestion, all of us with an enthusiasm that showed our certainty that Mrs Isles could play the part brilliantly.

Like Mrs Isles, Mr Henesy was ill-served by the scripts and the house acting style that prevailed after the vampire was introduced (the “Go back to your grave!” style.) That ill service created a major problems later in the series. The “Haunting of Collinwood” storyline (episodes 639-700, which I usually group as part of the “Meet Amy” segment) turns on complex feelings of anxiety and dread that grip David Collins and Amy Jennings (played by Denise Nickerson.) The scenes between David and Amy work well enough; these two young actors not only convey the intricate malaise of people driven by obsession and fear, but even manage to find unexpected humor in their roles, turning into a grumpy old married couple after a few scenes together. But when Mr Henesy plays opposite an adult actor he often finds himself in an impossible situation. I give an example in this comment on episode 680:

This episode shows what Joel Crothers was talking about when he said he was glad to leave Dark Shadows because they had started spending so much time setting up special effects that the actors could no longer rehearse properly. You see it in the confrontation between David and Maggie, after he finds her waiting for him in his room. Kathryn Leigh Scott doesn’t have many lines, and only one emotion to express, sternness. She does a great job. But David Henesy has lots of complicated lines, and is trying to show us a character who is lying and who feels conflicted about lying. It would take a lot of practice for any actor to figure out a way to get all that across, and he doesn’t seem to have had the chance for it. Compare that scene with the many times he and Alexandra Moltke Isles overcame the drab dialogue they had to work with in their scenes together in the same setting, and it’s hard not to lament the missed opportunity.

Things got even worse for Mr Henesy when he was cast as Tad Collins in the 1840 segment of the show, for reasons I try to explain:

The writing isn’t the whole problem with Tad.

David and Vicki becoming friends is the only story that works in the first 42 weeks of the show, and it works in spite of the fact that the writers give the actors nothing at all to work with. We cut from a drawing room scene where Roger loudly declares to Vicki that “Yes, I’ve always HATED David!” to a scene where David looks up from his desk and tells Vicki “My father hates me,” and she responds “David, THAT’S! NOT! TRUE!” But whatever idiotic lines the script may require them to speak to each other, the body language and tone of voice between David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles gets steadily warmer as the weeks go on, and you really believe that they are learning to care about each other. By the time Laura shows up, it makes perfect sense that Vicki is the referee between David and his mother, and it is inevitable that Vicki will be the one to pull him out of the burning shack.

As Tad, Henesy didn’t have the screen time it took to triumph over the writing like that, and frankly neither Kathleen Cody nor Kate Jackson was the sort of partner he needed to pull it off. Alexandra Isles worked very much from the inside out, feeling her way into the character’s emotions and letting them out through whatever parts of her were on camera, while the two K’s worked outside in, starting with the dialogue and putting the words on display. That may have made them a more natural fit for the Dark Shadows house style of acting (“Go back to your grave!”,) but it left everyone high and dry when the scripts stank.

For all that was against him, Mr Henesy did manage to create some bright spots in the later episodes. For example, his performance as evil sorceror Count Petofi speaking through the body of young Jamison Collins features some terrific moments, as I note in this comment on episode 803:

Much is asked of David Henesy in this episode. There are moments when he has to do a Thayer David impression. Those he carries off splendidly- “mineral water, for the digestion.”

At other moments, Petofi is tricking people into thinking that Jamison is free of his influence. That requires him not only to show the other characters a convincing likeness of Jamison, but also to show the audience the wheels turning in his devious mind. Sometimes that works- when he tricks Edward into letting him kiss him, he does create suspense as we wait to see his evil plan work itself out. Other times it doesn’t. When he tells Beth that “I just want people to like me,” he sounds so much like David Collins circa December 1966 that it just seems like he’s forgotten that he’s supposed to be possessed.

From time to time I spoke up in favor of other much-maligned cast members. In addition to the favorable reference to him above, I several times listed Robert Rodan among those I wished we had seen more on the show, and those references sometimes brought enthusiastic agreement from other commenters, suggesting that the negative remarks others made about him had more to do with the dead-end his character, the Frankenstein’s monster-like Adam, found himself written into than with the late Mr Rodan’s interpretation of the role.

Other actors may have left something to be desired from time to time, but did turn in good performances. I tried to call attention to those positive moments when others were venting about the less successful ones. For example, Lisa Blake Richards’ turn as Sabrina Stuart before and after the 1897 storyline is not widely admired, but I thought she was a substantial asset to the show in the “Meet Another Angelique” period.

Terry Crawford’s turn as Beth Chavez during the 1897 storyline is the object of a great deal of very harsh criticism, most of it justified. How many women could there have been who could not convince an audience that they were attracted to the young David Selby? But she did have one or two good moments then, and when she returned as Edith Collins in the 1840 segment she was very nearly competent.

Kathleen Cody also gets a lot of grief. I grant that Ms Cody was bad in the first episode in which she had lines to deliver (#1071,) but say that she was OK after that, and attribute the hostility to her to a mix of that bad first impression with a general distaste for the last 150 episodes of the show.

An actress who tends to be, not indeed denounced, but simply overlooked, is Elizabeth Eis. That puzzles me; I think she was phenomenal in all three of the parts she played. She had a one-episode spot as a devotee of the sinister Leviathan cult in #951; the character isn’t much, a cliched hillbilly teenager cribbed from Tobacco Road, and her main function is to serve as breakfast for the vampire. But in Elizabeth Eis’ hands, she bursts off the screen.

In “Meet Another Angelique,” she plays Buffie Harrington, a woman so lonely that she owns a television set (the only one we see in the entire series) and submits to life as a slave of the evil half of the Dr Jekyll/ Mr Hyde character. In that role, the late Ms Eis is so magnetic she makes a love scene with Jonathan Frid seem sexy.

In her final role, as jailer Mildred Ward in the 1840 segment, Ms Eis earned a spot in the Dark Shadows Hall of Fame by excelling in one of the show’s characteristic parts:

And another fine moment from Elizabeth Eis. Quentin, who is in jail on suspicion of strangling someone, grabs the constable’s wife through the bars of his cell and starts strangling her. The part of “person being strangled” isn’t an easy one to play, as Dark Shadows shows us two or three times a week, and she does it as well as any of them. You can see her cycle through about a half dozen emotions while she’s struggling for breath.

A few episodes later, Ms Eis reprised the role of Person-Being-Strangled, and she outdid even her previous performance:

Compare her scene getting strangled by Gerard in this episode with her scene getting strangled by Quentin last week… In the scene with Quentin, she cycles through a half dozen emotions while being choked; in this one, she digs down deep and shows a very specific form of terrified disbelief.

My usual themes: Imaginary Recasting

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. One of my most frequent themes was “Imaginary Recasting.” I explain what I mean by this in a comment on Danny’s post for episode 470:

During the slow moments, I recast the show in my head. Harvey Keitel was a background player on the show once, a dancer at the Blue Whale in #33. So I imagine him in Roger Davis’ place. And several Dark Shadows cast members (David Ford, Virginia Vestoff, and Daniel Keyes*) were in the original Broadway cast of 1776. So other members of that cast would have been available for parts on DS. I imagine Howard Da Silva in place of Addison Powell. With those changes, the version of the Jaff Clark**-Dr Lang scenes that plays in my head is quite good!

For the game to be fun enough to keep me going through the dire bits, it has to be plausible to me that the makers of Dark Shadows could actually have landed the actor in question. No doubt Laurence Olivier or Bette Davis or whoever would have been a valuable addition to the cast, but they were so unlikely to take such a part that I can’t make myself believe in the scenario strongly enough to distract from whatever it is I don’t like about what I’m actually watching.

The categories from which I draw imaginary cast members, then, include sometime non-speaking players like Keitel. In that group are also to be found Fredric Forrest, David Groh, Henry Judd Baker, and Susan Sullivan. A second category is people who appeared on the show in speaking parts but only briefly, such as Marsha Mason, Gail Strickland, Cavada Humphrey, Beverly Hope Atkinson, and Philip R. Allen. It’s easy enough to believe that people who accepted small parts on the show would also have taken bigger ones.

There are also several people who appeared on the show in major parts, but not enough for my liking. Among these I often mention Clarice Blackburn, Jerry Lacy, Alexandra Moltke Isles, Virginia Vestoff, and Robert Rodan.

There are also three categories of people who didn’t actually appear on the show, but who might well have. The first of these is the one I mention above, the cast of 1776. In addition to da Silva, I also mention Ken Howard, who was Thomas Jefferson in 1776 and who would have been an interesting choice for Morgan Collins in the dying days of Dark Shadows.

The other two categories each include just one person. If they could get Harvey Keitel and Fredric Forrest to dance in The Blue Whale, surely they could also have landed Robert de Niro to play a speaking role. I’m just as glad they didn’t- had he been cast as Carolyn’s motorcycle-riding boyfriend Buzz, the character might have been a big enough hit they would never have got round to making the spook show we all know and love.

The second one-person category is actors whom we know series creator Dan Curtis wanted to have in particular parts. The one person in that category is Bert Convy, Curtis’ first choice for the part of Barnabas Collins. I am glad Jonathan Frid was cast instead, but I do try to imagine what the show might have been like with Convy. I also try to imagine how Jonathan Frid might have done in Convy’s place as a game show host:

Which raises the further question of how Jonathan Frid would have done as the host of Tattletales. “Ladies, suppose you your fella, you- the two of you! Suppose you went to a kind of, well, a resort, a vacation place. And the beaches- multiple beaches, one of them as it happens a nude beach. A beach of nudeness! Suppose further that it was your choice and only yours- what I mean is, you must choose which beach to visit! The nude, or the other! Don’t give me your answer, you must not! But when I call for it, then, you will tell me which beach you choose!”

*I should also have mentioned Emory Bass and Peter Lombard

**For “Jaff,” read “Jeff,” not that it really helps