hugh franklin – 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 577: I imagined we would discuss Freud

Heiress Carolyn came running when her mother, matriarch Liz, woke her with her screams. Liz was having a nightmare about being buried alive. She tries Carolyn’s patience and ours with her obsession that this will in fact happen to her.

Liz tries to call her lawyer, Richard Garner. Whoever answers the phone tells Liz that Garner is not available, hardly surprising since it is the middle of the night. She responds that if he doesn’t call back within the hour, he need never call again. Since we last saw Garner in #246, and his name hasn’t been mentioned since #271, it seems like he may as well get some sleep.

Liz then calls Tony, a young lawyer in town who used to date Carolyn. Tony comes over and Liz hires him to help with some changes to her will. She dictates excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial” by way of a codicil protecting her from being buried alive, and he tells her he thinks she’s being weird.

The most prominent reference to Poe on Dark Shadows up to this point was in #442, when vampire Barnabas reenacted the plot of “The Cask of Amontillado” by bricking the fanatical Rev’d Mr Trask up in an alcove in his basement. Like Tony, Trask was played by Jerry Lacy, so it is possible that the writers hope the audience will recognize the connection.

Poe wrote punchy little short stories each of which leaves the reader with a single horrifying image. “The Cask of Amontillado” worked well as the basis for an episode, and the bricking up of Trask is one of the most enduring images in all of Dark Shadows. “The Premature Burial” could have made for the same kind of success, had Liz’ obsession begun and ended within one episode. But it has already gone on longer than that, and there is no end in sight. Each time we come back to it, the situation becomes more familiar and less urgent.

Meanwhile, Carolyn takes a glass of milk and a sandwich to Adam, a Frankenstein’s monster she is hiding in the long-deserted west wing of the house. Adam has little to do but read, and he has become quite intellectual. He is playing both sides of a game of chess when Carolyn arrives, pretending that she is his opponent. When she comes, he attempts a joke, pretending she has left him alone so long he does not remember her name. She is distressed about Liz’ obsessive fear of being buried alive, and so does not recognize that he is joking.

Carolyn looks at the chessboard and asks Adam who he is playing. He says that he is pretending to play her. He is smiling and relaxed when he admits this, and he starts joking again as he tells her about their imaginary games. Adam’s pretending that he did not remember Carolyn’s name was a weak joke, but he is actually pretty funny when he tells her that when he pretends they are playing, she doesn’t do as well as he does. She still does not realize that he is kidding, and reacts with horror. She says she doesn’t play chess; in #357, her uncle Roger mentioned that she does, but that she usually loses to him. Perhaps in the 44 weeks since then, she has given up the game altogether.

Adam wants Carolyn to play with him for real. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Adam shows Carolyn the book he has been reading, a volume of Sigmund Freud’s works, and is disappointed she has not already read it. When she tells him she is worried because of Liz’ condition, he invites her to sit down and says “Tell me about your mother,” suggesting that he is ready to set up shop as a psychoanalyst. Adam is being serious now, but this part of the exchange is hilarious.

Carolyn goes out to the terrace and looks at the night sky, wondering if Freud could help her understand what is happening with her mother. I live in the year 2024, and so I have difficulty imagining how people could ever have taken Freud seriously. But he was very very big in the 1960s, and in its first year Dark Shadows gave us a lot of heavy-handed Freudian symbolism and a number of storylines with obvious psychoanalytic themes. Longtime viewers will find it a reassuring sign of continuity that Freud is still around as the thinker “every twentieth century man should read.”

Tony joins Carolyn on the terrace. He greets her and sees that she has a book about Freud. “I don’t have to ask why you’re reading him,” he remarks. Carolyn asks if he is referring to her mother, and Tony’s response is so indiscreet he may as well spinning his finger around his temple and saying “Cuckoo, cuckoo!” It is clear enough that the concept of “confidential communication” is alien to the lawyers in Soap Opera Land, and now we see that “basic respect” is also very much on the optional list. Carolyn tells Tony to do whatever Liz asks, and starts crying.

I was startled by Carolyn’s crying turn, because it is the first time in the two hundred or so episodes she has appeared in thus far Nancy Barrett has given a subpar performance. The actors all had to work under virtually impossible conditions, so I rarely mention it when one of those who usually does well has a bad day at the office, but the 20 seconds or so she spends very obviously not crying in this scene mark the end of an extraordinary streak.

Tony embraces Carolyn and kisses her. Adam’s room in the west wing overlooks the terrace, and he spies on them while they kiss. After Carolyn excuses herself and goes back into the house, Adam comes up behind Tony, grabs him, forbids him to touch Carolyn, and throws him to the ground.

Episode 106: Swann song

At the end of Friday’s episode, dashing action hero Burke Devlin and the sheriff caught high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins digging up a fountain pen from under a rock. It appears to be the fountain pen Roger had stolen from well-meaning governess Vicki. Some think that Roger stole the pen and hid it because it is evidence implicating him in the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy. Today, Roger is in the sheriff’s office.

Accompanied by Richard Garner, the Collins family’s lawyer, Roger talks and talks, admitting that he saw Bill that night, badly injured and face-down in the water. He jumped to the conclusion that Bill was dead, and left the scene without notifying anyone. He also admits that he concealed evidence that he believed the police would find relevant to the investigation. As if that weren’t enough, he admits that he lied to the police time and again, most recently the night before, and is caught in yet another lie when he gives a nonsensical explanation of his plan to meet Bill that night.

Garner makes only one feeble attempt to interrupt Roger’s torrent of self-incriminating remarks. When the sheriff questions Vicki, Garner takes the opportunity to ask her some questions of his own, questions which produce even more information that is adverse to his client’s interests. On their site Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri feature commentary on Garner’s performance from a lawyer friend of theirs. Setting aside the utter hopelessness of Garner’s work from a real-world perspective, this friend analyzes his conduct by contrast with the standards set by other TV lawyers:

This brief addendum will review the competence of Garner using a “TV Lawyer Competency Rating” (TVLCR) scale. This WAG scale is based on my estimation of how a general audience might rate a TV Lawyer’s performance. I have supplemented these TVLCR scores with some comments reflecting real-world practices.
http://dsb4idie.blogspot.com/2016/11/episode-106-112166.html

Even by those standards, Garner doesn’t come out very well:

Garner strikes me as the go-to civil attorney for the Collins family who got dragged into this murder case just because they are familiar with him. Based on Garner’s poor competency rating as a TV Lawyer, Roger Collins should fire him and instead reach out to Raymond Burr or Andy Griffith.

Soap operas typically generate suspense by sharing information with the audience that some, but not all, of the characters have. We wonder when the secrets will be revealed, and how those to whom they are revealed will react when they finally get the news.

By the end of today’s episode, all of the characters will know almost everything the audience knows. Even what the characters don’t know, they’ve heard of. For example, Roger and drunken artist Sam Evans have not confessed the guilty secrets they share to any of the other characters, but everyone seems to have figured out more or less what they’ve been up to. Not everyone believes in ghosts, but it’s all over town that Vicki and her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, have seen ghosts in and around the great house of Collinwood, and even the most skeptical are not in a hurry to hang around the place after dark.

This is the next-to-last episode credited to writer Francis Swann. Swann will fill in for the new writers a week from Wednesday, but today is really the end of the Art Wallace-Francis Swann era of the show. From tomorrow, the new team of Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein will be holding the reins. By bringing all the characters up to at least our level of knowledge about the ongoing storylines, Swann is clearing the decks for Sproat and Marmorstein to set up their own crises and dilemmas.

Swann’s great strength is his ability to give actors room to show what they can do. Today’s episode is a case in point. Just when Garner’s disastrous intervention in the sheriff’s questioning of Vicki has led us to wonder if he’s all there, he has a moment when he opens his eyes wide and looks out the window. As Hugh Franklin plays it, that’s enough to make us wonder what’s on Garner’s mind, and to think he might be about to do or say something interesting.

Of course stage veteran Louis Edmonds thunders delightfully as the wildly indiscreet Roger, and of course TV stalwart Dana Elcar does an expert job of presenting the sheriff as a skilled professional firmly in control of the situation. There might be a crying need for a defense attorney to intervene when a suspect is blabbing as freely to the police as Roger is to the sheriff, but there is no need for a third actor to get in the way of Edmonds’ and Elcar’s interplay. Standing in the background between those two, Franklin occasionally gives a slight facial expression that underlines some point or other, but never upstages them.

In the first half of the episode, Alexandra Moltke Isles’ Vicki has to give some long speeches full of recapping, and in those she takes the character through several distinct shades of discomfort. She begins with diffident nervousness, builds up to frightened indignation, and ends with pure sadness.

Later, flighty heiress Carolyn comes into the sheriff’s office and pleads with Vicki to say that her beloved Uncle Roger couldn’t be a criminal. In front of the sheriff and Garner, all Vicki will say is that the two of them should leave. As Carolyn, Nancy Barrett makes the most of the melodramatic turn, but Mrs Isles takes possession of the scene with her few words spoken in a quiet, husky voice we haven’t heard before. Those brief remarks cap the progression we saw her making in her speeches earlier, and define the mood she is still in during a conversation between Vicki and Carolyn in Collinwood later. Vicki’s feeling for the pity of it all holds the episode together, and leads us back into the texture of the life of the family at the center of the story.