first time not the last – Page 14 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 70: David is gonna show me some ghosts

This one resets the series.

Reclusive matriarch Liz calls well-meaning governess Vicki into the drawing room in the great house at Collinwood. She asks Vicki where her charge, problem child David, is. When she tells her David is upstairs in his room, she asks Vicki to close the drawing room doors, explaining that she does not want their conversation overheard.

Of course David comes downstairs and puts his ear to the doors as soon as they are closed. Liz starts talking with her about some recent plot developments, and we hear a commotion outside the doors. Tightly-wound caretaker Matthew has caught David eavesdropping. Liz sends Vicki and David away, and talks to Matthew about events we saw several days ago.

David starts telling Vicki about the ghosts who haunt Collinwood, and shows her a drawing he made of one of them. Vicki is impressed with the drawing, and shows it to Matthew. Matthew accuses David of going to the Old House and copying the portrait hanging there. Vicki has never heard of the Old House- nor has the audience, it’s the first reference to it. David denies Matthew’s accusation, and says that it is a drawing of a ghost he has seen.

Vicki takes the drawing to Liz, who immediately recognizes it as Josette Collins. She opens the family history to the page featuring a portrait of Josette, and asks David if he copied that portrait. Again David insists it is a drawing of an actual ghost he has seen. The day before yesterday, in episode 68, we saw David studying that page, so it is quite plausible that he did copy it. Still, regular viewers will remember that in episode 52 the book opened itself to that same page when no one but the audience could see, so we might also wonder if David is telling the truth.

Flighty heiress Carolyn tries to talk her mother into hiring a housekeeper. When she mentions that one thing a housekeeper might relieve Liz of is her loneliness, she answers wryly, “You forget, dear, I have all of David’s ghosts.” In this reply, we return to the ambiguity of the first weeks of the show, when, in conversations with Vicki, one character after another would use the word “ghost” in a metaphorical sense, to refer to present difficulties resulting from unresolved conflicts in the past. Vicki would invariably respond with some line like “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts!,” as if they were talking about literal ghosts. And each time, the response would be that they did indeed believe in literal ghosts, and that if she stayed in the old dark house on the hill for any length of time she would believe in them too. Aside from the book opening itself in #52, the ghostly manifestations we have seen so far have been equivocal, possibly hoaxes, possibly tricks of the light. Even the incident of the book was small and symbolic. The ghosts could still dissolve into the atmosphere and into mere metaphor.

Determined to befriend David, Vicki agrees to go to the Old House with him to look for ghosts. We are treated to 90 seconds of location footage of Vicki and David walking through the woods to the Old House. This is by far the longest exterior sequence in the entire series, and it is done with extraordinary ambition. Most of Dark Shadows’ exterior shots are not only extremely brief, but are accompanied only by music. In this one, the actors’ voices are dubbed throughout, and multiple sound effects are added.

Vicki and David walking to the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

Vicki and David enter the Old House. As they do so, David shines his flashlight directly into the camera and creates a halo effect. This would not seem desirable, but it will be done dozens of times in episodes to come. It’s probably a mistake here- maybe a mistake most of the time- but they do it so often, there must have been some kind of intentionality behind it.

Vicki and David examine the portrait of Josette hanging above the mantle. Vicki is impressed with its likeness to David’s drawing. David tells her that he has been through every part of the Old House, but denies that the portrait was his model. He tells Vicki of the legend that Josette’s ghost is trapped at Collinwood until another girl falls to her death from Widow’s Hill, and goes on and on about his hope that Vicki will be that girl.

This charming conversation is interrupted when the door suddenly opens. Frightened, David breaks off in the middle of telling Vicki that he wants her to die and clutches at her for safety.

In a moment like this, we can understand why Vicki keeps believing she can reach David. She knows that he is deeply disturbed, and that his violence may well turn against her. But she can also see inside him an awareness that he needs a friend. She has decided to risk his worst in hopes that his sense of that need will eventually break through his rage.

It is Matthew at the door. He scolds Vicki and David for visiting the Old House after he had told them how dangerous it is. The three of them talk a bit about the legends, then Matthew insists on leaving. Vicki turns to David, apparently willing to stay there with him. David looks bitterly at Matthew, and says that there is no point in staying. Josette won’t appear when Matthew is around, because she doesn’t like him. When Matthew says the place should be torn down, David becomes upset and says that he will tell Josette to kill him if he tries it.

The three of them do leave. Then something happens…

We see the vacant parlor of the Old House. The portrait of Josette begins to glow. A figure takes shape, and walks down from the portrait to the floor. It vanishes from the parlor, and reappears outside. It dances among the columns surrounding the house, glowing an unearthly white. Josette has come all the way out of the back-world into the foreground. We can expect her to stick around. Perhaps others will follow where she has led.

Josette’s ghost emerges from her portrait. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

The ghost of Josette dances outside the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

On his blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning, Marc Masse cites the book Dark Shadows: The First Year, by Nina Johnson and O. Crock (Blue Whale Books, 2006.) I think you might have to go to Dark Shadows conventions to find a copy of this book. I’ve certainly never seen one.

Evidently, Johnson and Crock had access to much of the original paperwork generated by the makers of the show. Today’s closing credits are truncated by a technical fault. The only writing credit shown is Art Wallace’s story creator tag. Fandom has jumped to the conclusion that Art Wallace wrote the episode, but the documents show that Francis Swann did. That makes sense- the two of them have been swapping weeks, with Wallace writing five episodes, then Swann writing five. Swann wrote the other four episodes this week, and Wallace wrote next week’s five, so it would be a deviation from the pattern if Wallace wrote this one as well. Since the episode is such a watershed in the development of the show it is tempting to attribute it to the original writer. But clearly, it is Swann who gave us our first looks at the Old House and at Josette.

Episode 48: Tell us all where we’re going

In yesterday’s episode, Vicki the governess had come downstairs with a sketch of the great house of Collinwood that her charge David made. She showed the sketch to David’s father, Roger. Vicki tells Roger that she had taken the sketch from David’s room without David’s knowledge. Vicki spent the third week of the show trying to make it clear to David that by taking a letter from her room without her permission, he was stealing from her. Viewers who remember those episodes can’t help but wonder why Vicki is being so hypocritical.

Today, Vicki returns the drawing to David. He is surprised that she took the drawing, but pleased when she tells him how good she thinks it is. He’s starting to warm up to her, until she tells him she showed the drawing to Roger and that Roger liked it. At that reference to his hated father, David tears the drawing to pieces. David then brings up her lectures about his taking the letter and tells her she has one standard for children and another for grownups. She apologizes and agrees that she ought not to have touched the drawing. He refuses her apology and tells her he hates her. It goes on like that for a moment, until David’s aunt Liz walks in. At first Vicki tells Liz that what she’s hearing is an argument about the American Revolution, but she then says that David “had every right to be angry” because she took a drawing of his without his permission. David is involved with something else at that moment, but he does glance back at Vicki when she says “he had every right to be angry.”

Later in the series, Vicki will seem to lose quite a few IQ points. While it was foolish of her to take the drawing from David’s room without his permission and almost as foolish to tell him that Roger liked it, I don’t think this is quite a Dumb Vicki moment yet. Even the smartest adults do occasionally forget to respect children’s rights to privacy and to property, and it isn’t easy for anyone to really absorb the fact that a ten year old boy hates his father as intensely as David hates Roger. The most important thing about the scene is that Vicki admits to David that she’s wrong, apologizes to him, and tells Liz that David was in the right. The growth of a friendship between Vicki and David is going to be the most successful story-line of the first 42 weeks, and we can see the seeds of it right here.

Liz has come to David’s room to deliver a package. The package is a gift with a bow on it, brought by a messenger from the village and addressed to David. It’s a crystal ball, sent by David’s idol Burke Devlin. David loves it. Liz points out that Burke is the Collins family’s arch-nemesis, and says that it would be a good idea to send the present back. David pleads to be allowed to keep it, and she relents.

The crystal ball allows David to make all sorts of cryptic pronouncements, and gives the cameramen opportunities to take some ambitious shots. This still is featured on just about every webpage anyone has ever posted about the episode:

Screenshot from Dark Shadows from the Beginning

In a couple of years, we will see similar images, some of them giving great prominence to reflections of characters who aren’t supposed to cast reflections. For now, it is so unlike any other image in the show that I think we have to regard it as a message to the viewer. Just as David was the first character to look directly into the camera- he did it twice, in episodes 17 and 23, and no other character would do so until Sam did it day before yesterday, in #46- so he is the first one to look into a glass that will present us with a distorted image of his eye. The show seems to be laboring to get us to think about David’s viewpoint, about David as an observer.

The other plot also comes back to David as observer. Joe comes to the house and tells Liz that Bill Malloy didn’t come to work and isn’t at home. That gets everyone worried about Bill. Vicki tells Liz that Bill came to the house the night before, revealing to Liz that Roger lied to her. That gets Liz upset with Roger. David ties this together when he tells Vicki that he looked into the crystal ball and saw that Bill is dead, that his death was violent, and that Roger is responsible.

David is absent from the show for long stretches- today is the first we’ve seen him since #36. So it’s easy to regard him as a secondary character. But, we followed Vicki to Collinwood, and she came there because she had been hired to be David’s governess. The name “Collins” is something everyone on the show regards as terribly important, and David is the only candidate to carry that name into the next generation. They build a lot of story points around Burke, and at times Burke seems to be David’s fantasy come to life. David’s actions precipitated the saga of the bleeder valve, which was after all the first story-line on the show to be resolved. And David will be the fulcrum on which several story arcs will turn in the years to come. So perhaps we should see him as the central figure of the whole series.

Episode 35: I got a million recipes how to cure it. None of ’em work.

David Ford joins the cast as Sam Evans, replacing the woeful Mark Allen. Ford was always one of my favorites. He was one of the reasons I started watching the show when it was on the Sci-Fi channel in the 90s- I remembered him from one of my favorite movies, the musical 1776, where he plays John Hancock.

Marc Masse made a point in his Dark Shadows from the Beginning that I hadn’t thought of before. I’d always thought of Thayer David as the founder of the Dark Shadows house style of acting (“Go back to your grave!”) That isn’t wrong, as we will see when Thayer David joins the cast next week. But David Ford made a much bigger contribution than I realized. Several members of the cast, especially Louis Edmonds and Nancy Barrett,* tend to play their roles in a big, stagy manner, but Ford represents a step beyond them.

Masse writes:

To this point Dark Shadows has been written, directed, and acted solely as a vehicle for television.

Here in episode 35, the style of acting on Dark Shadows takes a theatrical turn with the debut of David Ford, who, with one grand and sweeping wave of the arm and eloquent turn of phrase, will single-handedly transform the acting approach from that of a standard television show to that of a teleplay:

“A façade, my dear boy!”

You have to wonder if that line was an ad lib; it fit in perfectly with the gesture, and thus far Art Wallace has never written with such a fanciful flourish.

Masse also gives some very interesting information about what Ford was doing when he landed the role of Sam Evans, information that points towards an approach to casting that will become a marked feature of the show in the years ahead:

In the year preceding Dark Shadows, Ford was performing on the Hartford Stage in a successful production of the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the role of Big Daddy. That’s why when he first appears on Dark Shadows he has that half a beard type style, having fashioned his performance of Big Daddy after the one made famous in the 1958 motion picture adaptation, especially the way he scrunches up his eyes for the effect of dramatic intensity, giving it his best Burl Ives.

There is indeed a good deal of Burl Ives in today’s iteration of Sam, enough that we can assume that Ford was hired in part as a Burl Ives imitator. In future years, we’ll see Jonathan Frid, who looks like Bela Lugosi and walks and talks like Boris Karloff, playing a character who is a mashup of Lugosi’s Dracula and Karloff’s Imhotep.** And Jerry Lacy, who was most famous for his Humphrey Bogart imitation, and whose first role on the show was as a Bogart-inflected lawyer. And David Selby, who, if you listen to him with your eyes closed, you’d swear was Joseph Cotten. And Roger Davis, who Joan Bennett famously described as show business’ answer to the question “What would Henry Fonda be like if he had had no talent?” Ford is the first of that company of mimics, and among the best.

This is also the first episode where Carolyn and David have a scene together, rather odd considering we’ve had 34 episodes mostly set in the house where they are two of the five residents. Carolyn can’t stand the boy to start with, and in this one she’s just found out he tried to murder his father, her beloved uncle Roger. Besides, she’s in a bad mood because Joe called her up and told her he found Vicki in Burke’s hotel room. So they have a shoving match, she tells him he’s a monster, etc. Nancy Barrett and David Henesy ham these scenes up so grandly that it’s hard to imagine why they haven’t been on camera together before, it’s tremendous fun.

This is a bad episode for Alexandra Moltke Isles. Carolyn is nasty to Vicki about Burke, then apologizes and gets mad at herself, all while Vicki stands perfectly still with a smile plastered on her face. Vicki’s own lines are patronizing and inappropriate, starting with “Carolyn, you idiot” and going downhill from there. When Carolyn makes the painful admission that she has a tendency to grab for everything, Vicki delivers a smugly sanctimonious “That’s a good way to end up with nothing.” At the end of the episode, Vicki has a brief confrontation with David, which Mrs Isles plays well enough, but there isn’t much to it.

I think Mrs Isles’ technique was to start with the emotions the character was supposed to be feeling and to project those through whatever dialogue she is given. That’s served her well so far. Dark Shadows was her first professional acting job, and she fits right in with old pros like Joan Bennett and Broadway up-and-comers like Mitch Ryan. But she’s just awful in these scenes. My guess is that she couldn’t figure out what Vicki was feeling or thinking, since no one would do or say the things she does or says in today’s show, and so she just tried to stay out of Nancy Barrett’s way. Or maybe she read the script, thought Vicki was being an ass, and decided to play the character in the most asinine way possible. Either way, I winced to see it.

*Both natives of Louisiana. I doubt that means anything, but as the series goes on and gradually loses all interest in creating an illusion of being Down East someplace near Bar Harbor, I get more and more interested in the geographical origins of the actors. I’ll try to confine that topic to footnotes for the next three years, but when we hear David Selby’s voice we’re going to talk about the idea of a New England Brahmin with a West Virginia accent.

**Imhotep is the title character from The Mummy. Originally I was going to say that Frid moves and sounds “like Boris Karloff’s Mummy,” but that rather overstates the feminine side of his role.

Episode 17: Such a strange question

Another of the diptych episodes in which Art Wallace excels. This time we have two pair of contrasting scenes.

David, thinking he has succeeded in his attempt to murder his father by tampering with the brakes on his car, awakes from a nightmare and walk out through a feature no nine-year-old boy’s bedroom should be without, a full window that opens on a ledge above a two hundred foot drop to the sea. Elizabeth stops him before he can jump. David is hysterical, Elizabeth frantic to console him.

Juxtaposed with the wrenching scene between David and Elizabeth is a very light scene between Roger and his doctor. Roger is in the doctor’s office, pitying himself for his minor injuries. The doctor is overly friendly and relentlessly makes little jokes at which he himself seems to be quite amused. Roger is annoyed with the doctor’s manner and impatient with his work. The self-contained, self-satisfied, ultimately trivial Roger seems to live in a different world than the one where his son is suffering so grievously.

Then we have two scenes of teacher and student. Bill Malloy explains hydraulic braking systems to Roger and a scene in the drawing room where Elizabeth tells stories from family history to David. Since Malloy’s explanation advances the mystery story that is the main thread of the show at the moment, it is fascinating, and since the early history of the family is not (yet!) relevant, Elizabeth’s stories are intentionally presented as tedious. Here’s how I put it in the comments on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die:

Bill Malloy was a talented guy. His explanation of a hydraulic braking system, supplemented by that admirably drawn schematic, was not only crystal clear, but genuinely interesting.

There’s a structural justification for it- Liz’s lecture to David about Isaac Collins in front of Isaac’s portrait is deliberately presented as boring. So including another lecture supported by a single illustration and making it urgently interesting shows that what’s boring isn’t the format, but the relevance of the content to the story.

That venture into educational programming is a fine example of the freewheeling experimentation the series was doing in these early weeks. Some of those experiments come up again. The final 2 seconds of the episode is the first time a character looks directly into the camera, a trick they will use to advantage many times down the line.

Also, the date 1690 is interesting, not only because the portrait is ludicrously anachronistic- the man is wearing clothes from and is painted in a style that date from 200 years after that date- but also because we will hear about that period again, near the end of the series. Most likely that’s a coincidence, but I suppose it’s possible someone connected to the show in its final months remembered that the 1690s were supposed to be important in the history of the family.