howard da silva – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 469: Temporarily arrested

Well-meaning governess Vicki and mad scientist Julia have gone to the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town. Vicki wants to see whether her memory is correct and there is a chamber hidden behind a secret panel in the mausoleum, and Julia is trying to limit what Vicki can find. As they enter the mausoleum, Vicki shines a flashlight directly into the camera, then sees a man lurking in a dark corner of the mausoleum.

Vicki assures us that, no matter how much the show might have changed since last summer, it’s still *Dark Shadows*.

The man is Peter, an unpleasant fellow with whom Vicki unaccountably fell in love when she met him on an unscheduled journey through time to the 1790s. For no reason that will ever be of interest to the audience, Peter keeps insisting that his name is Jeff and that he is not a time traveler. Yet he is the one who finds the mechanism to open the secret panel and expose the hidden chamber where Vicki and Peter once found refuge. Even after that he keeps wasting our time with his pointless denials of the obvious facts.

While they inspect the chamber, Vicki realizes that Julia knew it was there. She confronts her about it, and Julia feigns ignorance. Vicki points out that Julia tried everything she could to keep her from going to the mausoleum and that when those efforts failed she insisted on accompanying her there. Vicki is taking a breath, apparently about to list further evidence supporting the same conclusion, when she glances at Peter and changes the subject.

Vicki remarks that the only way the room has changed since she was there in the late eighteenth century is that there is now a coffin in the middle of it. Julia knows that it is the coffin in which vampire Barnabas Collins was confined from the 1790s until 1967. Barnabas bit Vicki several days ago, but it didn’t really take, and he has since been cured of vampirism. So Vicki probably doesn’t know that Barnabas ever was a vampire, and certainly doesn’t know that it is his coffin. Peter opens the coffin. The empty interior of the coffin dissolves to Barnabas in his hospital bed.

Barnabas sits up by bending from the waist, showing that old habits die hard. He cries out for the doctor who rehumanized him, Eric Lang. A look of panic spreads across his face.

He is alarmed to hear hounds baying outside his window. He goes out on the terrace of his hospital room and touches its stone balustrade.

What, your hospital room doesn’t have a terrace with a stone balustrade?

Barnabas goes back inside and continues crying for Lang. When Lang shows up, he explains that the cure isn’t quite complete. There will be occasional relapses of varying intensity, and further treatments are necessary. Barnabas throws a tantrum in response to this news, pouting that if he has to keep taking medicine he may as well go back to being an undead abomination who preys upon the living. Lang talks him down, telling him that he is confident he will be able to effect permanent remission.

We see Julia standing in the rain beside a sign for the Collinsport Hospital, looking up at Barnabas’ silhouette in the window behind his balustrade. She walks away. We then see Lang at a desk in a large wood-paneled room. There is a knock. Lang gives a self-satisfied smirk as he looks at his watch, then opens the door to let Julia in. We see that the wood paneling continues in the corridor behind her. In later episodes we will learn this is in Lang’s house. In that case, the paneling in the corridor behind Julia makes it clear someone has already let her in. At this point, a viewer would naturally assume that it is Lang’s office in the hospital. Wood paneling may not be standard for doctors’ offices in hospitals, but neither are terraces with stone balustrades standard for patient rooms.

Julia had been treating Barnabas’ vampirism in 1967, and wants to reclaim the case. She and Lang sit across from each other and engage in a verbal fencing match. Lang uses many of the ploys we have seen Julia use to keep control of the situation. On his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn speculates that the audience’s revulsion at the prospect of Lang replacing Julia was the intended reaction. It cements our sympathy for Julia as a trickster figure and as the de facto protagonist of the chief storylines.

I agree with Danny’s assessment of the scene’s effect, but I doubt it was fully intentional. When I imagine the scene played with Howard da Silva instead of Addison Powell as Lang, I see the audience conflicted and in suspense. We are invested in Julia and her relationship with Barnabas, and so we don’t want Lang to push her aside. But an actor like da Silva would be so intriguing that we couldn’t help but be curious how it would play out if he did. It is only the severity of Powell’s professional deficiencies that causes us to see Lang as nothing but a threat. Compared with the more complex reaction a da Silva could have generated, this scene falls flat.

As Julia is leaving Lang’s office, Peter barges in. Julia’s eyes widen when she sees that the two are connected. Lang realizes that she is likely to make good use of this information, and is furious with Peter for exposing it to her.

It becomes clear that Peter has been implicated in a homicide, that he is suffering from amnesia, and that Lang is blackmailing him into stealing body parts from a nearby cemetery. When Peter says he will no longer help Lang, Lang threatens to send him back to the institution for the criminally insane where he found him. He also forbids Peter to see Vicki again, telling him that Barnabas Collins wants to marry Vicki and that Barnabas’ happiness is important to his plans.

In yesterday’s episode, Peter talked to Lang about his hope that he might be able to learn something about himself from Vicki. This reminds longtime viewers of the first year of Dark Shadows, when Vicki’s motivation for staying in the great house of Collinwood was her hope that she would learn who her biological parents were and why she was left as a newborn at the Hammond Foundling Home. Peter even uses the same phrases Vicki had used in expressing the desire to learn more about himself. Moreover, Vicki, like Peter, has an important gap in her memory, having forgotten key details of her time in the eighteenth century.

That Lang has plans for Vicki was strongly suggested last time, when he told her that he expected her to have an extremely significant future. When we see what future he has decreed for a character who is in a position so similar to Vicki’s, and that the future he has in mind for her includes marriage to Barnabas, we can have little doubt that his plans for her are most evil.

The scene between Lang and Peter is a very efficient piece of exposition, but it is poorly executed as drama. Addison Powell keeps pulling funny faces for no apparent reason, does not appear to have any control over the volume of his voice, and alternately drifts off his mark and stands unnaturally still. Roger Davis is a highly trained professional actor, but he must have skipped the day when his acting teachers covered means of shouting without sounding constipated. The two of them together are not very easy to watch. I get through their scenes with a further bit of imaginary recasting, picturing a onetime Dark Shadows extra like Harvey Keitel as Peter opposite da Silva’s Lang.

Episode 467: Pulsebeat

In a room at the Collinsport Hospital, very loud physician Eric Lang (Addison Powell) opens the curtains to show his patient, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, that it is a sunny afternoon. It takes Barnabas a moment to realize that this is Lang’s way of showing him that he has cured him of his longstanding affliction, vampirism. Once he figures it out, Barnabas is very happy to be human again.

Barnabas talks with Lang about the origins of his vampirism. At one point Lang says “Ah, so a curse was responsible.” You know how doctors are, always coming out with the same cliches. Lang does say something novel when he remarks on Barnabas’ “pulsebeat.” That specimen of Collinsport English will be back.

In the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas’ distant cousins Roger and Liz are at odds. Roger keeps having conversations with a portrait, in the course of which he loses track of the time. The correct time is 1968, and he keeps thinking it is 1795. When he does that, he mistakes himself for his collateral ancestor Joshua Collins and his sister Liz for Joshua’s wife Naomi. Today, Liz has to slap Roger to get him back to himself. Louis Edmonds’ alternation between Joshua and Roger is masterful, one of the outstanding moments of acting in the whole series.

The portrait is of Angelique, the wicked witch who made Barnabas into a vampire in the first place. At the hospital, it becomes clear that Angelique’s spirit is controlling Roger through it. He is cold and distant, staring out the window when Barnabas tells Liz he wants to take up gardening, refusing to say a word when Lang enters the room. When he takes his leave, Roger looks at Barnabas and declares “It’s not this easy.” We realize that he is a puppet for Angelique. Roger steals Lang’s cartoonish mirror-bearing headpiece.

Lang meets Roger. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We cut back and forth between Barnabas’ hospital room and the drawing room at Collinwood. At Collinwood, Roger shows the headpiece to the portrait and explains that it was Lang’s. He starts to twist it. In the hospital, Lang suddenly leaps up with a splitting headache. Roger stops twisting, and Lang says he’s better. He resumes twisting, and Lang resumes suffering. Roger tells the portrait he cannot obey its command to put the headpiece in the fire, and throws it across the room. In the hospital, Lang suddenly recovers from his headache. Barnabas tells him it was Angelique’s doing, and says that he will have to become a vampire again to spare Lang her attentions.

On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn identified Addison Powell as “THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS.” I don’t agree with that. In yesterday’s episode, for example, Powell attained a level that could fairly be described as “competent,” a label that forever eluded figures like Mark Allen (Sam Evans #1,) Michael Currie (Constable/ Sheriff Carter,) and Craig Slocum (Noah Gifford and, later, Harry Johnson.) And there will be times when his ludicrous overacting lends just the note of camp that turns a scene from a tedious misfire to an occasion for chuckling. But he is pretty bad today. When an actor gets to be depressing to watch, I sometimes make his scenes bearable by trying to imagine what it might have been like if, instead of casting him, they had chosen someone else who might have been available.

So many members of the original Broadway cast of the musical 1776 appeared on Dark Shadows at one time or another that I tend to assume that any of them would have accepted any part on the show. Howard da Silva played Benjamin Franklin in 1776, and he is my imaginary Dr Lang.

You can see da Silva’s Franklin in the 1972 movie version of 1776, where he plays the Sage of Philadelphia with frequent chortles that suggest a mad scientist gleefully working to release a murderous nightmare on the world, which is more or less the show’s vision of the founding of the USA. That isn’t Franklin’s only note- he has occasion to speak earnestly about the British Empire’s mismanagement of its North American possessions, and sorrowfully about the need to leave slavery alone while concentrating on the fight for independence. Those who have seen da Silva play subtle and powerfully compassionate men in his other work, for example as the psychiatrist in the 1962 film David and Lisa and as the defense attorney in the 1964 Outer Limits episode adapting Isaac Asimov’s story “I, Robot,” will hardly be surprised that he could be effective in those moments.

So when Powell overdoes the shouting, I imagine da Silva in his place, going through his bag of tricks to show us a man who might be taking a maniacal satisfaction in his blasphemous labors, who might be profoundly devoted to the relief of suffering, and who might be both at once. Sometimes I get a pretty clear image of what that would have been like, and when that happens the show in my head is hard to beat.

Episode 470: Mad Men

In which I say that by imagining Howard da Silva in Addison Powell’s place and Harvey Keitel in Roger Davis’, I was able to sit through the whole Dr Lang/ Jeff scene without throwing up.

Episode 470: Mad Men