david henesy – Page 8 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 68: Only friend in the world

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:

David throws a chair in Vicki's direction — Screen capture by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

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.

Episode 60: Double, double

Soap operas are supposed to have a weekly rhythm. Fridays bring a whirlwind of flashy, unexpected events, building up to a big cliffhanger. On Monday, the cliffhanger is resolved and the flashy, unexpected stuff is sorted out so that new viewers can find their way into the show. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, you experiment with new storylines that may or may not go anywhere, and on Thursdays you set up for another boffo Friday.

At no point in its run did Dark Shadows adhere to this pattern. This week, for example, has had four relatively fast-paced episodes on Monday through Thursday, then slows down for a Friday episode consisting of a couple of leisurely conversations. Conversations in which the audience is presented with a lot of basic exposition, but still, a big shift down in dramatic intensity from the four days leading up to it. A bit later, after writer Art Wallace leaves the show, there will be weeks with no apparent structure at all, certainly no boffo whirlwind Fridays. After the show becomes a hit and Sam Hall takes the lead among the writing staff, every day will be a whirlwind, and every commercial break a cliffhanger.

One of today’s conversations takes place in the home Maggie Evans, the nicest girl in town, shares with her father, drunken artist Sam. The other takes place in the sheriff’s office.

Maggie has brought well-meaning governess Vicki home for dinner. They talk about Vicki’s quest to learn the secret of her origins and about the manslaughter case that sent dashing action hero Burke Devlin to prison ten years ago. Meanwhile, Burke has barged into the sheriff’s office and is demanding information about the ongoing investigation into the mysterious death of plant manager Bill Malloy. The sheriff gives Burke more answers than it would be proper for an investigator to give a member of the public in real life, but nonetheless frustrates his need to dash into heroic action. Burke leaves the sheriff’s office, and barges into the Evans cottage as dinner is served. The Friday cliffhanger is Burke asking if he may join the Evanses and Vicki for dinner.

I suppose you could call this one of Art Wallace’s diptychs. Both conversations feature insistent questioners and reluctant responders. Burke improperly demands information from the sheriff. The sheriff parries his demands, observing Burke’s reactions as he sizes him up as a suspect in the case. The sheriff remains very much in control of the situation. As in previous episodes, we see that the sheriff alone exercises power in the sheriff’s office. By contrast, Sam loses control entirely in the face of his two questioners. Again as in previous episodes, we see that Sam has no power to resolve a conflict, whether at home or anywhere else.

That’s the dramatic content of the episode. The expository content is much more involved. Vicki looks through Sam’s paintings, and finds a portrait that strongly resembles her. When Sam tells her that the painting is 25 years old and that the model was a Collinsport girl, Vicki is excited, thinking she may have found a relative. Sam tells her he doesn’t believe that’s possible. He had heard that the model, whose name was Betty Hanscombe, had died a few months after he painted her portrait, years before Vicki was born, and that she had no living relatives.

Vicki and Maggie hold the portrait of Betty Hanscombe — Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Note that Sam had only heard that Betty died. She had left town before then, and had no close connections to anyone with whom Sam was in touch. He could easily have heard wrong. So experienced soap opera watchers will brace themselves for the possibility that Betty Hanscombe will make a surprise entrance at some point and reveal herself to be Vicki’s mother and someone else’s secret half-sister.

When Maggie and Vicki ask Sam about the manslaughter case, he becomes agitated. Trapped into telling the story, he takes a drink and looks away from the young women. He tells essentially the same story high-born ne’er-do-well Roger had told his sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, in episode 32, but with some details added.

Burke and Roger were extremely close in those days, ten years ago. For a moment, Sam seems to be having trouble finding the words to express just how close. Along with Burke’s girlfriend Laura, they went drinking one night at a bar on the road between Collinsport and Bangor. Witnesses at the bar testified that Burke was so drunk they had to carry him to his car, and that he insisted on driving. Roger and Laura were his passengers. Burke himself admitted that he blacked out and couldn’t remember the drive. At some point, the car hit and killed a man named Hansen and kept going. At the trial, Roger and Laura testified that Burke was driving when his car hit Hansen. Burke thought that he might have got out of the driver’s seat and handed the keys to Roger before the accident. Burke was convicted, and publicly swore that he would avenge himself on Roger. A week after he was sentenced, Roger and Laura were married.

So that’s the basis for “The Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline. I’m not a criminal lawyer, but I wonder if Burke wouldn’t have been guilty of manslaughter no matter who was behind the wheel at the moment of the collision. By all accounts, Burke drove drunk, and was drunk in his car when it killed someone. If at some point he stopped driving and handed the keys to someone else whom he knew also to be drunk, that would indeed add to that person’s culpability, but I don’t see how it would clear Burke’s name. To do that, Burke would have to change the events themselves.

To make sense of the storyline, perhaps we can revisit the tale of the night of the accident. Two lovers and their friend were in a car involved in a hit and run. Afterward, one lover turned against the other, and took up with the friend. Everyone thought the lovers before that night were Burke and Laura, and that the friend was Roger. But if the men were lovers and Laura were the friend tagging along on their date, Burke’s frantic campaign to alter the past and Roger’s grim determination to hide it take on a new significance.

The cast of the show and its writing staff were largely drawn from Broadway, where in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s many playwrights had hits with dramas in which some people try to rewrite history and others try to conceal it in desperate attempts to erase unconventional sexual relationships. Indeed, when Sam stumbles in his attempt to find words to describe the bygone intimacy Roger and Burke shared, we can’t help but remember that Sam is played by David Ford, fresh off a long engagement as Big Daddy in a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It is by no means fanciful to wonder if that stumble hints at the suspicion of a relationship Tennessee Williams would have found interesting.

Miscellaneous:

At the end of his post about this episode on Dark Shadows from the Beginning, Marc Masse goes on at length about other things you might have seen on television in mid-September 1966. This is not my favorite feature of his blog, but this time it includes a couple of irresistible bits from commercials featuring Dark Shadows cast members. Here’s a still from a spot in which David Henesy sells cereal (with a side of racism, but it’s hard to imagine that was his fault):

Screenshot by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

The same post features an audio clip of Thayer David selling NyQuil. Here’s the commercial:

Episode 59: He sort of talked me out of it

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.

David and Roger stare at each other — 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.

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.

Episode 53: You can move almost anything by water

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.

David and Vicki at breakfast — Screenshot by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

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.

David and Vicki in his room — Screenshot by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

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.

Episode 50: He wasn’t there again today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 36: Politeness is a passing phase

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.

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 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 5: Good morning, you lovely people

This episode features the first appearance of one of my favorite sets, the kitchen at Collinwood. There’s an intimacy to hanging out in the kitchen, whether you’re actually sharing a meal or not, that makes it a natural place for people to exchange information.

Vicki and Carolyn do share a great deal of information with each other during their breakfast. By the end of it, we know everything Vicki knows about her origins, and enough about what was happening at Collinwood during her infancy to see the possible resolutions to the mystery about her.

David Henesy also has a heavy load of acting to do in this one as David Collins packs Vicki’s bags and calls for his mother. The script doesn’t give him much help in making these actions compelling, but Henesy’s face projects such intense emotions that his scenes move the audience powerfully.

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.