erica fitz – Dark Shadows Commentary

Preemption Day: Dark Shadows actors on N.Y.P.D. (1967-1969)

On 23 October 1970, the ABC network preempted its afternoon lineup to cover President Richard Nixon’s address to the General Assembly of the United Nations. As a result no episode of Dark Shadows premiered 56 years ago today.

A few months ago, I was looking for something to watch on TV. My eye fell on a show from the 1960s I’d never heard of, titled NYPD. I flipped over to it, expecting it would hold my attention for a few seconds at most. But I saw that the guest star was John Karlen, Willie Loomis himself, playing a television reporter. Like Willie, Karlen’s character thought he had found a path to fortune and success, only to end up hopelessly entangled with a homicidal maniac. Karlen was great of course, and the show was way above average for cop shows of any period. Also, the opening title sequence, shot from a perspective immediately behind a flashing light on top of a car speeding through the city streets, was obviously the inspiration for the same image in the opening of Police Squad! So I watched it again the next time it was on, and soon found myself watching it as a matter of habit.

NYPD was produced in New York City for ABC from 1967 to 1969, and Karlen was one of a great many Dark Shadows cast members who had parts on it. Their appearances are fun for Dark Shadows fans, and in more than a few cases, they played remarkably similar roles. There were other connections between the shows as well- Ohrbach’s even provided the wardrobe.

Here are some of the casting overlaps. The first season was 26 episodes long, the second 23:

Season 1, Episode 1, “Shakedown”: Opens in a hotel room where a man appears to have committed suicide. The hotel manager is played by Conrad Bain; as when he played Mr Wells, manager of the Collinsport Inn, we don’t get to see nearly enough of him. The hotel detective is played by Dana Elcar, Sheriff Patterson #1. The heroes from the 27th Squad of the New York Police Department are exasperated at having to deal with Elcar’s character, since he is notorious throughout the city as an utterly incompetent investigator. Good to see that he didn’t lose his Collinsport ways when he moved to the big city! And John Harkins, who appeared in four roles on Dark Shadows, always as a mysterious man from another place, plays a nameless character who is the secret leader of all the gays in NYC (I don’t know if the gays all share a secret leader now. Maybe things were different in the sixties.)

Season 1, Episode 2, “Fingerman”: Joel Fabiani was heard but not seen as Paul Stoddard in #271, when we flashed back to the night when Liz learned Paul’s secret and tried to beat him to death. In this episode, Fabiani plays a man who is frantic because his secrets have caught up with him and now someone wants to beat him to death.

Season 1,Episode 8, “To Catch a Hero”: Michael Currie was Dark Shadows first law enforcement officer, the hapless Constable Jonas Carter. In this episode, Currie plays an army officer assigned to assist the detectives with the case of a psychotic war veteran. He fails to provide appropriate security to keep the veteran from getting loose and the police are forced to shoot him. That’s exactly the result we’d expect if Constable Carter were in his position.

Season 1, Episode 9, “Murder for Infinity”: John Karlen’s episode. Other familiar faces in the cast are Ralph Waite, the future Pa Walton, as the homicidal maniac and Sam Waterston as a beatnik who uses “hetero” as a pejorative term to describe Karlen’s character. There’s no word on whether the Sam Waterston character is satisfied with John Harkins’ secret leadership, but I do wish the young Sam Waterston had been on Dark Shadows as a militant sexual liberationist who sneered at straight people.

Season 1, Episode 10, “The Pink Gumdrop”: Nancy Barrett is glimpsed for about three seconds sitting at a table in a cafe where people plan car thefts.

Season 1, Episode 11, “The Witness”: about 20 minutes into it there was Bob O’Connell, a.k.a. Bob the Bartender, as laboratory technician Gerardi. He has several lines, but is uncredited. He isn’t even listed on IMDb, so I took this screenshot to prove that it is him:

Criminalist Gerardi is supposed to analyze the ink on a document and determine when it was signed.

Season 1, Episode 12, “Boy Witness”: A 13 year old sees a woman shot to death and claims to have seen the gunman. A fingerprint on the cartridge of the fatal bullet leads the detectives to a man who matches the boy’s description and who was dating the woman. The man is played by Mitch Ryan. Ryan’s character breaks into the boy’s bedroom, and when the police catch up to him he assaults them and attempts suicide. It turns out the boy didn’t really get such a good look at the guy, so the detectives say that now they have to start all over. Since they could prove that he loaded the murder weapon, that would seem to be an overreaction! That overreaction reminds me of Burke Devlin’s belief that he was somehow proved innocent of vehicular manslaughter because he wasn’t driving his car when it hit the victim, he was just passed out drunk in the back seat after he had given the keys to an equally drunk guy. Still guilty!

Season 1, Episode 16, “Cruise to Oblivion”: Hugh Franklin played Richard Garner, grey eminence of the Collins’ family’s legal team on Dark Shadows. In this one, he plays the grey eminence of a drug ring. James Hall was Willie Loomis #1, a young mariner who seems to have lost his sea papers and who is a subordinate in some kind of unsavory scheme. Here, Hall is a subordinate in the scheme Franklin’s character oversees, and is connected with a ship carrying heroin.

Season 1, Episode 20, “Cry Brute”: Clarice Blackburn played three characters on Dark Shadows whose function was to introduce false allegations. Housekeeper Mrs Johnson was originally supposed to accuse Roger Collins of killing Bill Malloy; repressed spinster Abigail Collins brought in the Rev’d Mr Trask to accuse well-meaning governess Victoria Winters of witchcraft; and hateful biddy Minerva Trask accused neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond of all sorts of things. In this episode, Blackburn plays a wife who backs her husband up when he falsely accuses one of Our Heroes of assault.

Season 1, Episode 24, “The Private Eye Puzzle”: Donna McKechnie as a young woman with a secret, over a year before she appeared on Dark Shadows as Amanda Harris.

Season 1, Episodes 25 & 26, “Nothing is Real But the Dead” Parts One and Two: Michael Hadge, who attained immortality as motorcycle enthusiast Buzz on Dark Shadows, plays a man the detectives meet in a pool hall. In Part One, he’s on camera for about a minute, enough to make a strong impression. He complains angrily about the damn dirty hippies who have moved into the neighborhood and are ruining it for all the hardworking, clean-living old-time residents such as himself and his family.

In Part Two, he gets another minute. The detectives remember his vociferousness against the hippies, and suspects he may have killed one of them. He denies it. Hadge has a very fine needle to thread here. The character is pretending not to be afraid of the police, and he is not as good an actor as Hadge is. We notice his insincerity, and are left wondering if he might be guilty. But it takes more time than Hadge has to really deliver on this, so we wind up attributing the character’s shrill awkwardness to his limitations and bumping ourselves out of the story for a little bit.

Season 2, Episode 1, “Naked in the Streets”: Vince O’Brien played a couple of forgettable roles as senior law enforcement officers on Dark Shadows. He has an equally forgettable role in this one as the New York Police Department’s Commander for the borough of Manhattan.

Season 2, Episode 2, “Encounter on a Rooftop”: Alfred Hinckley had a bit part in the first episode of Dark Shadows as a train conductor, and a more substantial part later as a doctor who is initially courageous when confronted by the monsters, but who ends up letting them have their way. He has a small part in this one as a man who reports a prowler and sets off the action.

Season 2, Episode 5, “Deadly Circle of Violence”: Gene Lindsey has a great scene as a man who catches up to a racist mass murderer played by some guy called Al Pacino. He doesn’t share any scenes with the murderer’s girlfriend, played by a actress named Jill Clayburgh. I wonder if those two ever called Lindsey for career help when he made it big as Randall Drew in the 1840 segment of Dark Shadows.

Season 2, Episode 6, “Case of the Shady Lady”: Harvey Keitel danced at the Blue Whale in #33; within two years, he played the manager of a dance club in NYC in this episode.

Season 2, Episode 7, “The Golden Fleece”: John Harkins has a major part as a man who gives the police an incomplete report of a a robbery of which he was the victim. Erica Fitz is credited as a waitress, but we didn’t notice her.

Season 2, Episode 9, “Walk the Long Pier”: Hugh Franklin reprises his role as the drug kingpin, but doesn’t have much to say. Dolph Sweet, a forceful Collins family loyalist in #99, is a forceful police official. Frederic Forrest, who danced at the Blue Whale in #137, appears briefly and is credited as “Customs Official.”

Season 2, Episode 12, “The Love Hustle”: The episode opens with Lara Parker walking into the squad room, raving that her mother is in danger, and dropping dead. Most of the time she is on screen she is photographed in an extreme closeup focused on her eyes. She’s only on for a minute, but the rest of the episode is an investigation of what happened to her, so she makes an impression.

Season 2, Episode 13, “The Body in the Trunk”: Mitch Ryan is the angry father of a girl who died under unsavory circumstances. House Jameson, who appeared in #270 as the useless Judge Crathorne in #270 and #271, here plays the even more useless doctor who is responsible for the girl’s death.

Season 2, Episode 14, “Night Watch”: Daniel Keyes plays a locksmith, which I suppose might be a joke about his name. Come to think of it, as the Caretaker at the old cemetery north of town he played a character whose chief responsibility was locking and unlocking gates and doorways, so perhaps he was cast on Dark Shadows for the same reason.

Season 2, Episode 15, “Three Fifty Two”: Frederic Forrest, wearing a wig that appears to be made of an old truck tire, is the second most prominent member of a gang of robbers who beat up two of the three main characters.

Season 2, Episode 21, “Boys’ Night Out”: David Ford, Sam Evans #2 and Andre DuPrés, is a detective who advises Our Heroes on his specialty, extortion rackets. He just sits across a table from them and gives a brief lecture in a reassuring tone. He appears to be reading off a teleprompter.

Season 2, Episode 22, “Everybody Loved Him”: Alfred Hinckley has another small part as a witness.

Season 2, Episode 23, “No Day-Trippers Need Apply”: Lee Beery and Gaye Edmond play women who are more or less prostitutes, which their characters on Dark Shadows were not. Philip R. Allen plays a policeman, which his was.

Episode 610: You are the angel of death

A woman named Eve sees a man standing on the terrace of the great house of Collinwood. She addresses the man as “Peter Bradford.” Regular viewers know that this is indeed his name, but we also know that he prefers to be called “Jeff Clark.” Peter/ Jeff has died and came back to life since he was first known as “Peter Bradford,” so I suppose you could say that’s a case of deadnaming. But while most transfolk tend to be patient when people inadvertently deadname them, Peter/ Jeff is a huge jerk about correcting people who use his former name. Yesterday twelve year old David Collins called him “Peter Bradford,” and he grabbed the boy and shook him until it looked like he had given him a concussion.

Eve is also a returnee from the world of the dead. Doubly so; her body is a Frankenstein creation made of parts salvaged from corpses, while her memories and personality are those of eighteenth century homicidal maniac Danielle Roget. Peter lived in that same era, and when Eve/ Danielle recognizes him we learn that they knew each other then. Peter/ Jeff doesn’t assault her as he did David; she’s his own size. He doesn’t recognize her, which she attributes to the fact that she looks different than she did when they knew each other. He keeps whining that his name is “Jeff Clark,” but she isn’t having it.

Meanwhile, Peter/ Jeff’s fiancée, well-meaning governess Vicki, is in the drawing room, having a conversation with matriarch Liz. There is a blooper in the middle of this conversation. Liz is supposed to say something like “Then you’ve resolved all your difficulties,” but Joan Bennett stumbles over the words. Alexandra Moltke Isles improvises a response that makes sense of it. That response is smooth enough, but she delivers the rest of her lines very quickly and with unusually little eye contact with her scene partner. Perhaps that is because she was afraid the improvised line was going to put the scene over time, or maybe she realized she had called attention to Bennett’s flub and was nervous because she had embarrassed a big star.

Or maybe Mrs Isles was nervous because her next scene was going to be with Peter/ Jeff, and she knew it would involve Roger Davis putting his hands on her. As they exit, Peter/ Jeff clutches Vicki by wrapping his arms around her in a remarkably awkward fashion, and she visibly squirms. This is most likely Mrs Isles’ discomfort arising from Mr Davis’ habit of physically assaulting his scene partners. A charitable viewer just might be able to believe that it is Vicki’s discomfort because Peter/ Jeff just spent the whole scene telling her transparent lies. He doesn’t want to tell her about his encounter with Eve/ Danielle, and makes up totally unconvincing excuses for his distracted state. Perhaps Mrs Isles channeled her unhappiness at being yoked with Mr Davis into her expression of Vicki’s dissatisfaction with the loathsome little man she is engaged to marry.

Once Vicki and Peter/ Jeff are gone, Eve/ Danielle emerges from the bushes whence she had been spying on them. Liz comes out to the terrace and sees Eve/ Danielle. She asks who she is. When she does not answer, Liz tells her that she knows- she is the angel of death. Eve/ Danielle is startled by this, and hurries away.

The next scene takes place in the house of suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Nicholas has been keeping Eve/ Danielle there since she came to life. She has returned from Collinwood. Nicholas is upset with her for going out without his permission. She taunts him, and he slaps her. He threatens to kill her, and she says that while she does not know what his plans are, it is clear to her that she figures too prominently in them for him to do that.

Coming so shortly after we saw an actress give strong signs of unease at contact with Roger Davis, Nicholas’ slap to Eve/ Danielle’s face is a lesson in how professional actors handle scenes involving physical violence. Eve/ Danielle is relaxed before the slap and in shock after it. Her reaction gives the scene its energy. If Marie Wallace had reason to believe Humbert Allen Astredo would actually hit her, she may well have been as tense before the slap as Mrs Isles was before Roger Davis slithered his arms around her, and the scene would have dribbled out as lifelessly as does Peter/ Jeff’s scene with Vicki.

Once Nicholas concedes that Eve/ Danielle is important to his plans, she relaxes again and decides she may as well tell him about her encounter with Peter/ Jeff. Nicholas is intrigued, and disturbed. He tells Eve/ Danielle that “If it is true that they are one and the same, then there are forces at work here that I don’t know about.” Eve/ Danielle’s memory of her previous existence is very incomplete, and she wants Nicholas to help her to learn more about herself. Once he has heard about Peter/ Jeff, he is eager to oblige. He hypnotizes her.

At this point, my wife, Mrs Acilius, expressed frustration. “He’s going to hypnotize her and afterward she won’t remember anything! It’s only interesting if she remembers.” Eve/ Danielle does have a flashback to 1795, but at the end she seems to come out of the trance on her own. She turns to Nicholas, calls him by name, and says that she remembers Peter Bradford and she loves him. Since Nicholas doesn’t give her a post-hypnotic suggestion and snap his fingers, it seems likely she will remember her past with Peter.

When Danielle was introduced, I assumed that the name “Roget” was a case of deadline-induced selection. She is based on Madame DuFarge from A Tale of Two Cities, so she had to be French. But the writer didn’t have a list of French surnames at his fingertips, so he looked at his desk, saw a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and went with that. Perhaps that was what happened, but today Eve/ Danielle lives up to her namesake and goes into the synonym business. She calls Peter/ Jeff by his original name. She is on the receiving end of synonymy from Liz, since “the angel of death” is as good a name for her as any. And one of the memory gaps Eve/ Danielle wants Nicholas to help her fill is her previous name.

Marie Wallace plays Danielle in the flashback, even though she had mentioned in the first act that she looked different in those days. This occasions much discussion on the fansites. Here is the debate on the Dark Shadows Wiki:

During the fiashback scene, Danielle Roget should have been played by Erica Fitz instead of Marie Wallace. Fitz had previously portrayed Danielle Roget in episode 594, so it would have made sense and for character continuity to continue using the same actress. [Addendum: There are strong reasons to argue otherwise as well. One could argue that this is a memory that Nicholas is conjuring in Eve, so it’s from Eve’s perspective, and she would naturally see herself in her current guise, not even knowing what Danielle Roget looked like. This is also a reasonable place for dramatic license to prevail. The scene is very short, and it wouldn’t have been especially practical to have an additional actress. It’s also possible that viewers may have been confused if another actress was in the scene–Erica Fitz was on the show for only two episodes, so viewers at the time might not even have seen or not fully remembered what she looked like. Aside from that, it’s also possible Erica Fitz was not available.]
Discussion under “Bloopers and Continuity Errors” in “610” on The Dark Shadows Wiki.

In a comment on his own post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn puts it more succinctly:

Yeah, I think the in-universe explanation is that the flashback pictured at the top of this post is Eve’s hypnosis-assisted memory of the event, so she’s picturing herself as she is now.

The real-world explanation is that Marie Wallace is playing Eve/Danielle now, and exactly nobody wants Erica Fitz to come back and appear in the flashback.
Comment left 23 March 2015 by Danny Horn on “Episode 610: Inexplicable You,” Dark Shadows Before I Die, 21 March 2015.

For my part, I’m sure Erica Fitz Mears is a very nice lady, and we should all give her money to help with her health problems. But no, she was not a good actress and I do not regret that she did not get more work on screen. Since Mrs Mears was only in two episodes, today’s flashback might have been an opportunity to give some other actress a chance to show what she could do as Danielle. But Miss Wallace does a very good job, and rounding the episode with two confrontations between the same pair of performers does a great deal to strengthen its structure. It would probably have been a mistake to cast anyone else in the flashback.

The flashback scene does come as bad news to longtime viewers, for reasons that have nothing to do with the casting of Danielle. When in November 1967 the show needed to develop a backstory for vampire Barnabas Collins, it took us back to 1795 and introduced Angelique, a maniacal ex-girlfriend who was determined to disrupt Barnabas’ new romance. That was a triumph that turned Barnabas from a stunt that boosted their ratings sufficiently to ward off cancellation into one of the major pop-culture phenomena of the 1960s, and Angelique herself became one of the show’s most important characters. That they are trying the same tactic with Peter/ Jeff, right down to a dramatic date of 1795, leads us to fear that they see him as a permanent part of the cast, and that they want to tie Eve/ Danielle as closely to him as Angelique is tied to Barnabas.

Episode 594: Ominous stillness

In yesterday’s episode, everyone was very upset about the death of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and frightened that Frankenstein’s monster Adam would react to it by murdering everyone in the great house of Collinwood. Then it turned out Adam was sitting peacefully under a tree and Carolyn was alive and well, so the upshot of it all was that the audience grew half an hour older.

Today, suave warlock Nicholas Blair tells Adam that it is thanks to his powers that Carolyn is alive. Nicholas also gets Carolyn to go to his basement and help him with a séance. This doesn’t take the same form as the show’s previous séances, nor is it meant to achieve the same purpose. Rather than putting questions to a ghost who has been trying to communicate, Nicholas wants to raise a spirit that he will then reinvest with flesh. It is the spirit of homicidal maniac Danielle Roget.

Danielle lived in France during the First Republic, and enjoyed sending people to the guillotine. Later, she came to America and, as Nicholas says, “died… here.” The emphasis he puts on the word “here” makes it sound like she died in the basement, though they don’t follow up on that. Nicholas tells Carolyn how evil Danielle was, and she is puzzled that he wants to raise such a spirit. It’s odd that she goes along with it. Maybe she is simply too tired to say no- after all, she just died a couple of hours ago, that must take a lot out of a person.

Carolyn’s temporary death was the result of an unsuccessful attempt to create a mate for Adam. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and old world gentleman Barnabas, with assistance from Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis and an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff, have built a woman’s body from parts scavenged from corpses and set up some very flashy equipment in Barnabas’ basement. The procedure needs a living woman to donate her “life force” to animate the constructed body. Under Nicholas’ influence, Carolyn volunteered to be that donor. Since everyone agrees that they shouldn’t kill Carolyn again tonight, Nicholas tells Adam that he will provide another woman. That is why he wants Danielle.

Regular viewers might have been surprised that Nicholas guided Carolyn to volunteer. In #575, he had said that the donor would have to be “the most evil woman who ever lived!” so that he could be sure she and Adam would produce a race of offspring loyal to the devil. Carolyn was tempestuous and selfish in the first six months of the show, but she was never really evil. Perhaps Nicholas not only brought Carolyn back from the dead and kept Adam from going on a murderous rampage, but also arranged the failure of the experiment so that Julia and Barnabas would have to use Danielle.

Danielle appears. She is disappointed Nicholas won’t let her kill Carolyn. Nicholas tells her to come back in a bodily form. She tells Nicholas that she can exist in that state for only a few hours; he tells her she will only need a few hours.

Barnabas is home alone, wondering where Julia is. A knock comes at his front door. It is Danielle, in modern dress, introducing herself as “Leona Eltridge.” She says Adam told her to come. The door opens further, and we see that Adam is standing next to her.

Erica Fitz as Danielle Roget, alias Leona Eltridge.

Danielle/ Leona is played by Erica Fitz. Miss Fitz’ IMDb page has a total of five credits, the earliest in 1966 and the latest in 1970. She is an unbelievably bad actress. She doesn’t deliver lines, but articulates her dialogue word by word as if she were presenting challenges to the contestants in a spelling bee. She seems to be a nice person, though. In 2017, a GoFundMe was posted in her name because she has an incurable form of cancer. Describing herself on it, she wrote: “My biggest ‘claims to fame’ were that I was in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first movie in the U.S. called Hercules in New York (we did not win an Oscar), a TV series entitled Dark Shadows, and a small part in a Broadway show entitled There’s a Girl in My Soup.” It doesn’t look like the fundraiser is still open, but she’s still around.

Nicholas refers to Adam’s mate today as “Eve.” This is the first time we have heard her called by that name.