Dashing action hero Burke Devlin pays yet another visit to the great house of Collinwood. He announces to its residents, the ancient and esteemed Collins family, that he intends to take control of all their properties, including the house. He is buying up their debts and will use them to seize their businesses. He offers to pay them for the house, though. He even offers to pay for it at higher than the market value.
Ne’er-do-well Roger Collins urges his sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, to take Burke’s offer for the house. It’s a huge, gloomy, impractical place, and they would be better off without it. He doesn’t mention that the cash might come in handy when Burke starts calling in all the notes they have no way of meeting. Liz won’t hear of it, and vows to fight.
Flighty heiress Carolyn and well-meaning governess Vicki process their feelings about the matter. Carolyn is wounded by the evidence that Burke never really wanted to be her boyfriend- not that he ever said he did, but she kept hoping. Vicki wonders what Burke is thinking, and whether he understands his own motives. He admits that he may not- after all, if he’s trying to avenge the wrongs the Collinses have done him by bankrupting them and collecting their assets, why not just watch their house fall into his lap with the cannery, the fishing boats, and whatever else they may have, leaving them with nothing?
With this post we say goodbye to one of the bloggers who has kept us company. This was the last episode Marc Masse discussed on his blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning. His posts usually include stimulating insights, sometimes remarkable scholarship, and occasionally material that is in one way or another frustrating. Still, he is always well worth reading.
Among his most extraordinary contributions was about the story of the sabotaging of Roger’s car, a.k.a. The Saga of the Bleeder Valve. That story began when we, accompanying Vicki, saw Burke standing by Roger’s car in episode 13.
Burke tells Vicki that he was looking at Roger’s car because he was thinking of buying one like it, an explanation she finds unconvincing.
In his post about episode 46, Masse includes a long section about similarities between the Saga of the Bleeder Valve and a particular episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. He convinces me that Art Wallace and Lela Swift had studied that episode. You’ll notice from his screenshots that that John Cassavetes even had the same haircut that Mitch Ryan wore as Burke:
Source material for the missing brake valve storyline on Dark Shadows can also be found in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour anthology series. In the episode Murder Case (season 2, episode 19; aired March 6, 1964), Gena Rowlands plays an actress (Diana Justin) in London married to a rich diamond merchant (Charles Justin) played by Murray Matheson. Diana isn’t really in love with her much older husband Charles, but since he is the main financial backer of a play she is starring in, her success is ensured… that is until the boyfriend she dropped so she could run off to England and start a production company with her rich husband, a struggling actor named Lee Griffin (played by John Cassavetes), manages to wangle his way through an audition and secure a part in the play by getting Diana to pass a good word along to the author and director of the production. Lee gets Diana to agree to resume their former relationship, and in no time the pair are in cahoots to relieve Diana of her marital obligations and in the process secure a huge windfall by plotting to have the old man bumped off. To accomplish this, they arrange for Charles to have an automobile accident; this is where the similarities to the missing brake valve story on Dark Shadows come into play.
One afternoon, on a visit up to the country home where Diana and Charles live, which is situated high up on a hilly area, Lee gets an idea when he comments on how the type of car that Charles drives is famous for its brakes.
To compromise the functioning of the car’s brake system, Lee first uses a wrench to loosen something, probably the bleeder valve…
…after which he pumps the brake pedal several times so there won’t be any hydraulic fluid left for when Charles next gets behind the wheel.
Just after completing the task, and with the wrench still in his back pocket, Charles walks in to find Lee there standing by his car, just like in Dark Shadows episode 13 when Victoria Winters walks into the Collinwood garage to find Burke near Roger’s car. To diffuse the situation, Lee explains to Charles: “I was, uh, just admiring your car. It’s, uh, fabulous!”
That night Lee and Diana have a performance in London; to set the plan in motion, Lee phones Charles from backstage while the play is still on and concocts a story about nearly having gotten into an accident on their drive into London due to a careless young motorist, which left Diana shaken up, and suggesting to Charles that he drive down to London to take his wife home…
…which he agrees to, just like in Dark Shadows episode 15 when Roger agrees to drive into town to meet with Burke at the Blue Whale.
Similar to how Roger in episode 17 is shown to have miraculously escaped with just a sprained arm and a few stitches to the forehead, Charles winds up crashing head on into a tractor that was just starting up the hill; despite that the car ended up a total loss, Charles was extremely lucky in having sustained only a couple of cracked ribs and a slight concussion.
The missing brake valve story on Dark Shadows never really did feel like something that would ordinarily be presented on a daytime serial drama. Instead, thus far Dark Shadows has taken its cue from 1940s film noir for atmosphere, Broadway theater style for acting performances, and nighttime mystery suspense anthology programs for subject matter. Is it any wonder that Dark Shadows would go on to evolve into the cultural phenomenon it would later become? A truly one of a kind blend of widely varying influences.
In his post for episode 76, Masse includes the audio of Joan Bennett singing “Sentimental Moments” in the 1955 film We’re No Angels. I’d never heard of the song, and had no idea she sang. Indeed she was not a Singer with a capital S, but her gentle, precise phrasing is perfect for this strange, sad little tune. I think of it as a farewell to Masse and his blog.
We intercut between two contrasting scenes: in the mansion at Collinwood, Vicki the governess and Carolyn the heiress pour their hearts out to each other, while in the Evans cottage drunken artist Sam refuses to answer any of the questions his adult daughter Maggie puts to him.
The disappearance of doughty plant manager Bill Malloy looms over both conversations. Vicki and Carolyn can’t avoid the conclusion that the body they saw face-down on the beach at the end of Friday’s episode was Malloy’s. Sam tells Maggie that the reason he can’t sleep is that he’s worried about Malloy.
The two settings connect when Sam telephones Collinwood in hopes the dastardly Roger will answer. The call prompts Vicki and Carolyn to break up their slumber party in Vicki’s room and come to the telephone outside the drawing room.
Vicki answers the telephone. Sam says “Collins,” Vicki asks to whom she is speaking, he hangs up. They then hear a noise from inside the drawing room. They go in and search to see if anyone is hiding there. Vicki goes directly to the window and pays special attention to the area behind the curtain on her right, a spot that will become a frequent hiding place much later in the series. I suppose it makes sense that people would eventually start hiding there- the camera has a great angle on it. Smart of Vicki to know that’s the first place to look.
The girls find a book open on the floor. Vicki demonstrates that the noise they heard was the sound of the book falling, but she cannot explain how it moved several feet from the table where it was kept to the spot where she and Carolyn found it. Carolyn insists that they consider the possibility that a ghost put it there. Since they had heard the same sound at least once while they were still in Vicki’s room, it would make sense to consider that someone or something must have been involved in picking it up and dropping it again.
Vicki and Carolyn leave the drawing room, and we see the book reopen itself to the same page. The camera zooms in, and we see that the page bears the name and likeness of Josette Collins. This is the first supernatural manifestation that the audience sees when no character is looking. We’ve been hearing about the ghost of Josette Collins from week one; we have to assume that she is leaving us her carte de visite.
Each of the previous supernatural manifestations had marked a moment when off-screen events were stirring up the spirits that inhabit the back-world behind the universe the characters inhabit. When troubled rich boy David had tampered with the brakes on his father Roger’s car in an attempt at patricide, reclusive matriarch Liz was asleep and ghosts were trying to reach her in her dreams. That same night, Vicki saw a door open and close itself inexplicably, and saw a shrouded figure on the threshold of the drawing room. At the beginning of this episode, Carolyn admitted to Vicki that while Collinwood has always been a strange place, it was only when she and Burke came to town that the really weird stuff started happening. So we have to take it that Vicki’s presence in the house is itself a matter of concern to Josette and the other ghosts, and that what is happening off-screen in connection with the body on the beach and the secrets Sam refuses to share with Maggie are going to bring the phantoms out of the back-world into the foreground.
It’s also interesting that the first character we see after the ghost of Josette announces herself is Maggie. At this point and for some months to come, the show will be developing a connection between Vicki and the ghost of Josette. But later on, both Maggie the character and Kathryn Leigh Scott the actress will be very much involved with Josette. The series involved very little advance planning, nothing at all like daytime serials of the present day that have their stories sketched out in detail months in advance, so that is probably just something you’d expect to happen when you only have four actors in the studio. Still it’s an eldritch moment for repeat viewers.
Within the context of the show as it actually was at this period, I think there is a point to the juxtaposition of the ghost of Josette with the scene between Maggie and Sam in the Evans cottage. Vicki and Carolyn are girls at a slumber party scaring each other with ghost stories. Even when the slumber party takes place in a mansion on a great estate belonging to the family that gave the town its name, that’s a silly situation. When the ghost stories turn out to be true, though, you’re suddenly vaulted into an elevated realm of fantasy. Turn to a small house where the adult child of an alcoholic is wearing her late mother’s night-gown and trying fruitlessly to prise some useful information out of her drunken parent, and you land back in the real world with a thud. Nothing here seems to be either silly or fantastic. Sam’s association with Roger’s secret, and therefore with the unknown events that are roiling the supernatural world, suggests that the mundane struggles of the Evanses and the fantastic doings at Collinwood will sooner or later collapse into each other.
I should mention Marc Masse’s post about this episode on his always intriguing, usually inaccessible blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning. Masse meticulously demonstrates the influence of the 1944 film The Uninvited on the show in general and this episode in particular with close analysis and multiple screenshots, and then does the same thing with an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called “The Gentleman from America.” It’s a very impressive and thoroughly convincing work of scholarship.
Masse’s blog is infamous among many Dark Shadows fans because of what he presents as transcripts of conversations between director Lela Swift, executive producer Dan Curtis, and others that he claims were picked up by the control room microphone and that he has recovered by some more or less magical technique unknown to other audio technicians. In this one he includes such a “transcript,” in which Swift (who didn’t direct this episode, but is supposed to be in the control room anyway) tells Curtis that she thinks it’s a terrible idea to do a ghost story or a Hitchcock story on daytime TV.
That installment of “The Dan and Lela Show” is pretty tedious to read, but in a way it’s a relief. In previous posts Masse has presented Swift as maniacally driven by lust for the female cast members, a presentation that her husband and their children might have found surprising. His post for episode 48 brings that presentation to a sort of crescendo. Since this one includes two shots of Vicki and Carolyn in bed together, I braced myself for Masse to outdo himself in that line, but there isn’t a bit of it there.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 