Tag: burke devlin

Episode 27: In your room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 22: I only run from enemies

This episode doesn’t intercut scenes as Art Wallace likes to do. Instead, we have four distinct scenes in succession, to only one of which do we cut back. First, Maggie and Burke at the Evans cottage; second, Sam and Roger at the restaurant; third, Sam, Maggie, and Burke at the Evans cottage; fourth, Carolyn and Roger at Collinwood; then, a reprise of Sam, Maggie, and Burke at the Evans cottage.

The first two scenes don’t give new information. Burke and Maggie do some recapping for the audience, then Roger and Sam reenact the exchanges they had in week one about the danger Burke represents to them both.

When Sam joins Maggie and Burke at the cottage, he jumps to the conclusion that Maggie has told Burke the secrets of the Evans family. Looking at the lines, I guess this was supposed to show that the tough facade he maintained in the face of Roger’s menacing crumbles when he finds Burke in his house, but since Mark Allen’s portrayal of Sam consists entirely of bellowing his lines it doesn’t really come off.

Burke offers Sam $1000 to paint a portrait of him that will fit on the walls of Collinwood, of a size and style that will fit with those of the Collins ancestors. In episode 11, Burke had asked Roger if Liz would want to sell the house or the business; Roger reflexively responded “You know she wouldn’t!” Asked what the “business deal” was he wanted to discuss with Roger at the Blue Whale the night of Roger’s crash, he claims that he wanted to talk further about buying the cannery. Now we have indications that his plan, whatever it is, will leave him in control of the house.

Roger and Carolyn discuss Burke. Carolyn says that she doubts Burke’s guilt, Roger loses his temper and says that he doesn’t care whether Burke is guilty or not. He then apologizes, explaining that he didn’t mean to say such a thing.

Usually the other actors manage to do a good job despite Mark Allen, but Mitch Ryan has a lot of trouble in this episode with the level of his voice. Even before Allen enters, he’s alternately too loud and too soft in the two-scene between Burke and Maggie, and from the time Allen enters his voice is never at a well-modulated level. I can only surmise that Allen bellowed his way through rehearsal as badly as he does through the finished episode, and that Ryan was trying to figure out how he was going to fight his way through the problem.

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 19: If it isn’t Burke Devlin, it’s somebody else

Most of this one consists of people worrying about each other’s attitudes towards Burke. Bill and Sam see each other, first in the Blue Whale, later in the restaurant, and in each place they share beverages while Bill needles Sam about Burke. In between these scenes, Joe and Carolyn are alone in the restaurant- completely alone, Joe apparently has to go behind the counter and prepare their meal himself- and they quarrel about Carolyn’s bold approaches to Burke before and during their date. At the end, Carolyn goes home, where her mother tells her about Roger’s wreck and about why she oughtn’t to be friendly with Burke.

Burke himself doesn’t appear in the episode, and none of the characters who do appear know as much about him as they think they do. What we get is a portrait of an isolated, gossipy little town, where rumors can start rapidly and grow in any direction. To the extent that “soap operas are approximately 90% information management,” as Danny Horn says, the typical setting of the gossipy little town, and its outgrowth, the false accusation, are the heart of the genre. As we watch these characters gossip and jump to conclusions, suspense forms as to how justice might miscarry if it isn’t stopped soon enough.

Episode 18: Strange sounds and lonely echoes

Only three characters in this one- Roger, Vicki, and David. In the previous episode, Roger learned that his crash was no accident, that someone tampered with his brakes. Now he wants Vicki to tell him what she can that will help him prove that Burke Devlin was the one responsible. Which is a great deal- she saw him in the garage, with a wrench, next to Roger’s car. She had gone into the garage after hearing what she thought was a car door slam. She admits that the slam could have been the hood over the engine compartment, and since the car door next to Devlin was open, this seems likely. Since the reason Roger was on the road was that Devlin had invited him to town to discuss “business,” and the two of them do not seem to have any business together at all, the case against Devlin seems quite strong.

David will place rather a substantial difficulty in the way of Roger’s hope of sending Devlin back to prison. As the audience knows, it was he, not Devlin, who removed the valve from the braking system on his father’s car. We even see him handling the valve in this episode. In episode 17, he nearly confessed to his Aunt Elizabeth, and this time he makes an incriminating statement to Vicki. Both women had assumed he was merely expressing guilt for his hostility to his father, and tried to reassure him that his feelings and thoughts didn’t mean that he was to blame for what happened on the road. David even tries to talk to his father in this one, and Roger icily dismisses him. But we’ve seen enough mystery stories, including inverted mysteries where the audience knows who done it before the detective does, to be sure that Roger will learn the truth when he least expects it.

Roger not only has reason to suspect that Burke is responsible for his crash; he also has deep, complex, ungovernable feelings where Burke is concerned. Some of those feelings have to do with the testimony he gave at the trial ten years before which sent Burke to prison. Some go back before that, and have to do with the friendship that existed between them before that trial. All of them are deeply secret.

This show was being made in 1966, when Freudianism reigned supreme in much of American intellectual life, and the most respected of respectable novels was Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. All of the cast and much of the production staff comes from Broadway, where at that time Tennessee Williams was the undisputed king of serious playwrights. And the part of Roger was played by Louis Edmonds, who came out of the closet as a gay man as soon as it was possible to do so, and who was never in the closet as far as his friends and colleagues were concerned. So it seems likely that the secrets Roger is so desperate to conceal include some kind of homoerotic connection with Burke. This episode lampshades some standard soap opera craziness in order to call our attention to the irrational nature of Roger’s attitude towards Burke, and I think a mid-1960s audience would be likely to suspect that a repressed sexuality is driving that irrationality.

Here’s how I put it in a comment on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die:

When Vicki tells Roger what she saw Devlin doing in the garage, Roger asks her to come with him to confront Devlin at the hotel. That’s a typical soap opera character idea. What isn’t so typical is Vicki’s response, that it would be better to go to the police. She sticks with that rational idea until Roger tells her of his urgent need to see Devlin’s face. That picks up on Roger’s frantic behavior in Week One and sets him up for the whole saga of Where Burke Devlin’s Pen Is, in which we see that Roger’s attitude towards Burke is rooted in some deep and complicated emotions.

Episode 13: Worst thing that ever happened to this house, him comin’ back

Vicki visits Matthew in his cottage, the first time we’ve seen that set. She hopes that he will tell him something about her past. He doesn’t, but he does go on about the Burke Devlin trial. After he has brought up the Devlin trial he asks her why she’s interested in it. She says she isn’t, he scowlingly demands she stop talking about it. She’s bewildered. That might have been meant to be a joke, but if so it doesn’t land- George Mitchell’s Matthew is just too intense, too tortured, for that kind of joke to work.

Vicki’s effort to befriend Matthew fails as completely as does her attempt to get information about her origins, but the cottage set goes a long way towards making it seem that it might succeed. We see Matthew cooking and sharing a meal with Vicki in an intimate setting, and for all his strange ferocity he is very talkative. When she answers a question of his with a lie that is sure to anger him violently if he discovers it, we are in high suspense, hoping against hope that she will not be found out.

The caretaker’s cottage isn’t the only set we see for the first time in this one. We also follow Vicki into the garage at Collinwood. She finds Burke there with a wrench in his hand, standing next to the open door of Roger’s car. Burke explains this odd situation by claiming that he had been thinking of buying a similar car and wanted to look Roger’s over. Vicki is suspicious, and says that Mr Collins wouldn’t like his being there. Burke asks her to keep it secret, an invitation she pointedly refuses to accept.

Unlike the caretaker’s cottage, which is a staple set of the series almost up to the very end, we only see the garage a few more times. That’s a shame, I think. The show is so much about the house that the stories would all be richer if they gave us more of a sense of the physical realities of the house and its functioning. Simply placing a scene in the garage, where people are handling tools and standing in front of machinery while they talk about whatever it is that’s going on in the story, can accomplish that without the need to dwell on anything technical or mundane.

Also, the garage is where cars are kept. A scene there can establish a connection with the outside world. Often the show intentionally builds a claustrophobic sense in the audience, but sometimes they simply have a long string of episodes set entirely in the house and get us feeling more confined than we have any need to do. In those periods, a scene set in the garage could let just enough air in to keep us from being distracted by the closeness of the quarters.

Episode 10: To the death of the monster

Carolyn is in Burke’s hotel room, where he charms her and tricks her into believing that he’s planning to leave town soon. I suppose the definition of “dashing” would be a charming fellow who makes things happen, things you wouldn’t have predicted and of which you aren’t sure you can approve. Burke is at his most dashing in scenes where he’s trying to enlist the women and children of Collinwood to his side. With Carolyn here, with Vicki back in episode 7, most of all with David in episode 30, we wonder what exactly he’s trying to do. He’s not so good with the men- when he tries to recruit Joe Haskell to his intelligence-gathering operation in episode 3, he ends up baldly offering him a bribe.

Liz and Roger are in the drawing room, where she demands he be less openly hostile to his son David. Unknown to them, David and his toy robot (a Horikawa “Attacking Martian,” which sold for $4.22 in 1966, not including two D batteries) are hiding behind a chair listening to Roger’s brutal denunciations of the boy. Unknown, that is, until Roger goes to the brandy bottle for his second drink, when the Attacking Martian starts attacking Roger.

Roger all but assaults David in response. David flees his father’s rage. He runs out of the house, telling Roger he hopes Burke Devlin gets even with him. Roger is as bleak and maladroit in these interactions as Burke is glittering and skillful in his handling of Carolyn. Again we see Art Wallace’s use of intercut scenes to bring out a comparison between characters.

After the second part of the scene in Burke’s room, David slips back into the house to find his Aunt Elizabeth asleep in a chair, muttering about ghosts. After all the talk about ghosts in the first two weeks, Elizabeth’s muttering about them seems significant- perhaps we are to think that her dream is a message from the ghosts who linger about the house, a sign that something is happening that will stir them up. Elizabeth awakes, and sees that David is in front of her, smeared with grease and holding a small object. He won’t answer any questions or let her see what he has in his hand. Before she can pursue the matter, Carolyn appears in the foyer, bringing an unexpected guest- Burke Devlin. Confronted with this shocking sight, she forgets all about David.

Episode 9: There are no ghosts here

The episode begins with Bill Malloy at the front desk of the Collinsport Inn, using the telephone to call Burke Devlin’s room. Burke hangs up on him. It ends with Carolyn Stoddard standing on the same spot, making the same call. Burke invites her up. Marc Masse has a nice discussion on his blog of what this pair of scenes means within the formal structure of the show at this point.

Carolyn tells Vicki about Josette and the two governesses who fell to their deaths from Widow’s Hill, and about the legend that a third governess will follow. Liz declares “There are no ghosts here,” but uses the word “Poltergeist” in a little speech about ghosts, a sufficiently sophisticated term in 1966 to suggest that someone using it has done serious reading about the supernatural. Coupling these lines with Burke’s statement in episode 7 that there are literal ghosts at Collinwood and other remarks that Roger and Carolyn have made in other episodes, the show is going out of way to keep the possibility open that there will be literal ghost stories.

Episode 3: Open your door!

Episode 3 of Dark Shadows is remembered chiefly for two things. It’s the one where Carolyn and Vicki first meet, and Carolyn introduces herself by going on at alarming length about her crush on her Uncle Roger. Vicki’s quiet reaction is just what you’d expect from a new member of the household staff discovering that a member of the family is a raving loon.

It’s also the one that opens with Roger pounding on the door to the Evans cottage and shouting “Open yer doah, ya drunken bum!”:

There is more to it. At the Blue Whale, Burke tries to enlist Joe in his intelligence-gathering operation, an attempt Joe virtuously rebuffs. Bill Malloy confronts Burke, showing that he, like Joe, is devoted to protecting the Collinses.

Art Wallace, the author of the show’s story bible and sole credited writer for its first eight weeks, specializes in a diptych structure, building an episode by interweaving two parallel scenes. That structure leads us to compare and contrast characters with each other in a wider variety of ways than we might if the scenes followed each other in succession. In this one, we see Joe and Bill faithfully standing up to Collins family foe Burke, while newcomer Victoria tries to assume the persona of a loyal retainer in her response to Carolyn’s bizarre talk.