Tag: joan bennett

Episode 55: We are the only ones here, unless you include the ghosts of your past

Sheriff Patterson is at the mansion on the estate of Collinwood, talking with reclusive matriarch Liz and Liz’ ne’er-do-well brother Roger about the mysterious death of plant manager Bill Malloy. Liz listens as Roger answers the sheriff’s questions, seeming every bit the trusting sister. The minute the sheriff leaves, she turns to Roger and asks in an icy voice “How much of what you told him was the truth?” She confronts Roger with the differences between what he told the sheriff and what he’d told her. Roger is upset, and finally tells Liz she has to trust him. Liz looks sadly off into the distance and says that yes, she does have to do that.

Liz saying she has to believe Roger
“Yes, I do have to do that.”

I’m always interested to watch actors play characters who are themselves acting. When she’s concealing her doubts about Roger from the sheriff, Joan Bennett has her first chance to show us what sort of actress she thinks Liz would be. She’s a skillful one- she does have some subtle reactions to Roger’s evolving story when the sheriff isn’t looking at her, but her abrupt, contemptuous turn to Roger is the removal of a convincing enough mask that it shocks the audience. And her statement that she does have to believe Roger, coming after she has made it clear that she knows he has been lying to her and is likely to go on lying, is a performer’s resolution to go on playing a part, however unpromising that part may be.

Intercut with the scenes at Collinwood are scenes in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn. Waitress Maggie Evans is serving one customer, her father Sam Evans. Sam wants Maggie to return a sealed envelope he gave her some time ago. He won’t tell her what’s in the envelope, why he wants it back, or why he gave it to her in the first place. She won’t give it back to him without answers to at least some of those questions.

Maggie and Sam at the restaurant
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Francis Swann is the writer credited with today’s script, but the contrast between the scenes at Collinwood and those in the restaurant form a diptych of the sort Art Wallace specialized in. Sister Liz demands information which brother Roger won’t give; Roger is a fountain of lies and evasions, and finally tells Liz that her idea of family loyalty requires her to behave as if he were telling her the truth. Daughter Maggie demands information which father Sam won’t give; Sam mutters little lies, stonewalls, and begs her to forget about the whole thing.

The two family pairs are both unhappy, but in different ways. The Evanses aren’t having any fun, but you can imagine them reopening communication and re-establishing trust, if only Sam can get off the hook in this crisis. Liz and Roger don’t seem ever to have trusted each other, but they are so much fun to watch that you can see how they might choose to go on fighting these battles indefinitely.

No one has told Maggie or Sam or anyone else that Bill Malloy is dead. When Maggie wonders if Bill might be able to help Sam with whatever troubles he’s refusing to tell her about, Sam replies that yes, Bill might be the only one who can help him. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin telephones the restaurant to order delivery of a meal; he asks if Maggie has seen Bill. Maggie tells Sam that everyone has been asking about Bill.

The sheriff comes in to the restaurant. Roger had told him that he was with Sam and Burke the night Bill disappeared, and the sheriff mentioned then that he’d be talking to both of them. The sheriff reacts strongly when he sees Sam, and tries to strike up a friendly conversation with him. Before the sheriff can elicit much of a response, he gets a telephone call. He rushes out of the restaurant as soon as he’s hung up. On his way out, he casually mentions to the Evanses that it was the Coast Guard calling to say they’d found Bill Malloy’s corpse. They are shocked at the news.

The sheriff doesn’t seem to be watching Sam’s reaction to the news about Bill’s death. That’s odd- while viewers know that Roger is the show’s principal villain at this point, Sam seems to be an equally likely suspect in the case of Bill Malloy. Casually mentioning such a terrible piece of news would seem to be a tactic that a policeman might use to gauge a suspect’s emotional state. Unless it is a tactic of some kind, it would be a spectacularly unprofessional way of announcing to the people of a small town that a highly respected local man was dead. Up to that point the sheriff hadn’t been presented as a blundering fool, so I wonder what they were saying by having him do that.

Miscellaneous:

Marc Masse’s blog posts about the first 54 episodes of Dark Shadows include promotions for Kathryn Leigh Scott’s novel Dark Passages. His post for episode 55 is the first that doesn’t include one of those, and is also the first in which he refers to Miss Scott as “the actress who plays Maggie Evans.” As in “scenes like this emphasize the great and natural chemistry for the father-daughter relationship being portrayed as embodied by David Ford and the actress who plays Maggie Evans.” I wonder if Miss Scott was alienated by “The Dan and Lela Show,” the dialogues between executive producer Dan Curtis and director Lela Swift that he claims to have heard in the background of the episodes. Many Dark Shadows fans were indignant about these, and I’m sure they let Miss Scott know about their objections. Perhaps she pulled her ads from Masse’s blog, and he couldn’t bring himself to mention her name afterward.

While I’m reporting on blog posts, I should mention that the “Collinsport Historical Society” post for this episode is hilarious. Here’s a quote:

Sam Evans is starting to regret writing his Get Into Jail Card that confesses his role in Devlin’s railroading. He tries to get Maggie to return it to him, but she’s not stupid. Maggie is probably a better avatar for the show’s audience than Victoria, and if there’s anything we like more than a mystery, it’s learning the solution to said mystery. While there’s genuine concern for her father’s latest alcohol, caffeine and tobacco binge, she suspects she’s in possession of the final few pages in the mystery novel the whole town is talking about. And she’s running out of reasons not to take a peek and see how things end.

Sam is doing his usual “I’m not looking suspicious by trying not to look suspicious, am I?” thing at the restaurant when Patterson arrives. There’s something of a performer in Sam, who brings his sketchiest A-game when he sees the sheriff, and gets twitchier than Peter Lorre with a pocket full of letters of transit. Luckily for him, the sheriff has other things on his mind. The Coast Guard has found Bill Malloy. Dead.

I’m beginning to lose track of how often we’ve been given the news that Malloy is dead.

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 44: Casually, and in passing

Even the dullest, most routinely soap operatic episodes of Dark Shadows have a couple of moments when you can tell they were being made by people with artistic ambition. This one is a case in point. Bill brings Liz some unwelcome information. Look at the composition of the shot:

Screenshot by Dark Shadows From the Beginning

They hold it like that for about a minute, and Joan Bennett’s response to the closeup really shows you how she came to be the movie star she was in the 1940s. It really is great.

In the same sequence, Carolyn hears for the first time that her adored Uncle Roger is in trouble. They cut to her for just a fraction of a second, which makes her reaction all the more effective:

Screenshot by Dark Shadows From the Beginning

The last shot is also a fine bit of visual story-telling. After his attempt to get Liz to face facts, Bill returns to the Blue Whale, and takes a seat in an even danker part of the bar than he’d occupied previously.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows From the Beginning

There’s also a good moment when the banker is presenting his visit as routine and Liz, who in the episodes earlier this week had been shown time and again to be in a precarious financial state, combines a faultlessly well-composed smile with hands trembling so hard her teacup almost cracks against its saucer.

And that’s it. The story points are a lot of tedious stuff about people we’ve never seen and relationships that aren’t going anywhere. Most of the actors do their best, but even in that department there is one notable exception.

The banker is played by Patrick McVey, a veteran character actor who could usually be relied upon to turn in a solid performance. He does well enough with the lines he remembers, but he takes most of his dialogue straight off the TelePrompTer. Marc Masse counts 22 shots of McVey catching up on his reading. That takes you out of the show, so that you start noticing everything else that’s wrong. In particular, the banker at one point tells Liz that anyone who might buy up her outstanding notes could put her out of business in a moment, and that in fact someone has been looking into the price of those notes. She asks who, he says “I don’t remember his name.” Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud at that, saying to the screen “Isn’t it printed on the TelePrompTer?” Obviously the script called for the banker to deliver that line, and maybe if McVey had known his part we could have overlooked the absurdity of it, but as it stands, it is the most memorable moment of the entire episode.

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 32: Where all criminals belong

In today’s compare-and-contrast, we see the sheriff and Bill Malloy demonstrating how mentally healthy people might react to the idea that a nine year old boy has devised and executed a plan to murder his father. Then we go to Collinwood, where we see how Liz and Roger react to the idea.

The sheriff can’t bring himself to say out loud what the evidence is leading him to suspect David has done. Bill can say it only in part, and then only to express shock and bewilderment.

The scenes between Liz and Roger in this episode are among the strongest in the entire series. Roger is quite drunk, almost giddy, almost laughing at the fact that his son tried to kill him. Liz cycles through a half dozen intense emotions before finally accepting the fact that David is the culprit. She orders Roger to lie to the sheriff and say that what happened to his car was a simple accident, that no one was at fault.

In response to her explanation that this is the sort of thing the Collinses have always done, Roger brings up his suspicion that David may not be a Collins at all. David was born less than nine months after Roger and Laura* were married; she’d been Burke’s girl… Liz won’t hear such things, and insists that David is a Collins, that he belongs to all of the ancestors. She blames Roger for raising David in a home where he knew nothing but hate from the moment he was born, hate he couldn’t understand or cope with.

Roger insists that David be sent away to a mental hospital; Liz says no, that he will stay in the house, that “Miss Winters and I” will give him the home life he needs. Her mention of “Miss Winters” in this connection makes it clear that Vicki is central to Liz’ plans for the future, whatever those might be.

The sheriff shows up. He’s taking his time to get to the point. Roger cuts him off: “Is it about David?” At that, even the background music falls silent. The sheriff starts talking. Liz jumps in and says that the sheriff should drop the investigation, that it was all just an accident. The sheriff looks uneasily from Liz to Roger and back again, and finally agrees to do so.

In the coda, Roger tells Liz that she will regret covering up for David. He gives her a look of contempt that is among the most powerful things I’ve ever seen on a screen. Liz is totally alone now; Roger will obey her, but he’ll never respect her again. Joan Bennett was pushed to the margins of the show in later years, but she really did fill her “Starring” credit in these first months. It isn’t every show that would present us the leading lady devastated like this.

*Aside from the prologue delivered by Alexandra Moltke Isles, there are no surviving cast members in this episode. As of 9 August 2022, it is the earliest episode of which that can be said.

**Laura’s name is first mentioned here.

Episode 4: Frightening a new friend

Here’s the comment I left on the Scoleris’ Dark Shadows Before I Die blog entry about this episode:

Interesting how the early episodes tiptoe towards the supernatural. Burke, Roger, and Carolyn all use the word “ghost” metaphorically, to refer to unresolved conflicts from the past that are still causing problems in the present. Liz and Vicki, each in her turn, responds by saying there are no such things as literal ghosts, only to hear the first person assert that there absolutely are. Giving this same little conversation to both Liz and Vicki is one of the ways the show tries to establish Liz and Vicki as mirrors of each other, of presenting Liz’s current life as a possible future for Vicki and of Vicki as a revenant of Liz’s past.

The sobbing sounds Vicki hears in this one are the first occurrences that would have to be explained as the act either of a ghost or of someone trying to make Vicki believe there are ghosts. The next such moment will come in episode 14, and there will be several more in the weeks and months ahead. This tiptoeing is what the Dark Shadows wiki on fandom tracks as “Ghostwatch.”

In view of the near-sexlessness of the later years of the show, it’s striking how frank this one is. Roger’s aggressiveness towards Victoria is plainly sexual. Liz catches him trying to sneak into Victoria’s bedroom, he derides her attempt to regulate his “morals.” He offers Victoria a drink, they talk about pleasure and pain in words that so clearly about sex that they barely qualify as sens double. Indeed, that is the only moment in the whole series when Victoria seems like what she’s supposed to be, a street kid from NYC. And the flirtation between Uncle Roger and his niece Carolyn is so blatant that it’s a wonder how Louis Edmonds and Nancy Barrett keep the scene from making the audience either laugh or feel ill.

A story idea: Adam in New York

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

In a number of these comments, I explained particular ways I had of correcting Dark Shadows in my head while I watched it. I rarely bothered telling people about times when I didn’t notice bloopers because I had put the words in the right order while hearing them, or other small corrections. I did mention times when I thought out major changes. Many of those changes could only be called fanfic.

Perhaps the most ambitious piece of fanfic I shared there, and certainly the longest, was my response to the show’s failure to resolve the story of Adam, the Frankenstein’s monster-like creature. My idea, if presented at the right time, would also have tied up the show’s most embarrassing loose end:

Here’s an idea I had today for a story that would save Vicki.

It would be a TV movie airing late in 1969. Start with a prologue set in Collinwood at that time. Adam returns, looking for Barnabas and Julia. He’s very well-spoken and accomplished now, but still socially awkward, still prone to fits of anger, and in need of help to get papers that he needs to establish a legal identity.

He finds that Barnabas and Julia are gone. He also happens upon some mumbo-jumbo that dislocates him in time and space.

It plops him down in NYC in 1945. With his facial scars, everyone assumes he’s a returning GI injured in the war. He meets a young woman, supporting herself by work at a magazine about handheld machines, trying to establish independence from her wealthy family back in Maine. This woman, played by Alexandra Moltke Isles, is Elizabeth [Collins.]*

Adam and Elizabeth slide into a love affair. She has another boyfriend, a dashing young naval officer named Paul Stoddard. Elizabeth is frustrated with both Adam and Paul; Adam refuses to talk about his background, and while Paul says many words when asked about himself, he doesn’t really give significantly more information than Adam does. Paul is slick, charming, and familiar with all the most fashionable night spots, but he does show signs of a nasty side. Besides, he rooms with a disreputable young sailor named Jason McGuire who keeps turning up at the most disconcerting moments.

For his part, Adam is sincere, passionate, and attentive, but given to quick flashes of anger. He’s just as quick to apologize and sometimes blubbers like a giant baby with remorse for his harsh words, but he’s so big and so strong that when he is carried away in his fits of anger Elizabeth can’t help but be afraid of him. Besides, he’s not a lot of fun on a Saturday night. He doesn’t have a nickel to his name, and his idea of an exciting weekend is an impromptu seminar on Freud’s TOTEM AND TABOO, followed by a couple of games of chess.

Elizabeth’s mother, played by Joan Bennett, comes to town. Mrs Collins is appalled by Adam’s scars, impatient with his refusal to discuss his background, and contemptuous of his obvious poverty. Paul’s effortless charm and sparkling wit, packaged in the naval dress uniform he makes sure he’s wearing when she first sees him, fit far more tidily into her vision of a son-in-law. Mrs Collins presses her daughter to spurn Adam and pursue Paul, and for a time Elizabeth tries to comply with her wishes.

Yet she cannot forget Adam. Paul realizes this, and sees his chance at an easy life slipping away. We see him in a dive in Greenwich Village telling Jason McGuire that Elizabeth and her inheritance are going to end up with the scar-faced scholar. He and McGuire review Adam’s weaknesses, and decide they can exploit Elizabeth’s concern about his temper. They trick her into believing that Adam is on the run from the law, having beaten his wife to death. They lead her to believe that it’s just a matter of time before his occasional verbal outbursts give way to physical abuse, and that when that happens it will be too late- he will kill her. Believing this, Elizabeth gives Paul another chance, but still cannot break things off with Adam.

Adam does not know what Paul and Jason have led Elizabeth to believe. He knows only that she has become distant from him, and that she is still seeing Paul. He becomes angry and shouts at Elizabeth. He reaches for an object; she believes it is a blunt instrument with which he will kill her. In a moment of panic, she grabs a gun she has been studying for an article the magazine has assigned her to write and shoots him. As he lies motionless on her floor, she discovers that he wasn’t reaching for a weapon at all- he was reaching for a love letter that he had written to her. She realizes that he was no threat to her, that she has shot him for no reason.

She flees to Paul and Jason’s apartment, telling them that she has killed Adam. Paul calms her and promises to take care of matters so that she will not be suspected of any crime. Paul and Jason go to her apartment and find it empty. There are bloodstains on the carpet where Adam fell, and a trail of bloodstains leading down the hallway out the front door. They follow the stains and find Adam nursing a serious, but clearly not fatal, wound. They lead Adam back to Elizabeth’s apartment. They draw on their naval training to remove the bullet, clean and dress the wound. After a conversation. Adam admits that there is no point in his pursuing Elizabeth, and he agrees to leave town. Paul gives Adam some money and promises to tell Elizabeth that he is all right and that he doesn’t hold a grudge. Adam shakes Paul’s hand and leaves.

Paul and Jason clean the bloodstains. They then return to their own apartment. On the way they exchange a look that begins as nervous, and ends with two broad grins. Elizabeth asks why they were away so long. They tell her that it takes quite a while to dispose of a corpse. She sobs. Paul holds her.

Paul and Elizabeth announce their engagement. A few weeks later, the doctor informs Elizabeth that she is pregnant. The child must be Adam’s. Paul is not interested in raising any child, and certainly not interested in splitting the estate with a child not even his own. He orders Elizabeth to give the baby up. She refuses. He points out that she wouldn’t be able to do much mothering if she were in prison for murder. She sobs. In the final scene, we see Elizabeth outside on a snowy day, holding a basket and writing a note. In voiceover, we hear the contents of the note: “Her name is Victoria. I cannot take care of her.”

*Originally I wrote “Stoddard” here.

My usual themes: Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother

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. Several times it occurred to me that a Dark Shadows features a number of older sisters who clean up messes that their misbehaving younger brothers make, and that a variety of male-female relationships on the show take on the dynamic of a bossy big sister and her bratty little brother. Danny doesn’t cover the first 209 episodes of the show, when we learn that Roger Collins has managed to squander his entire inheritance, half of the family fortune, and that his older sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard has gone deeply into debt to contain the damage that his irresponsibility has done to the family business. Elizabeth takes Roger into her house, and alternates between demanding that he reform his ways and enabling his ongoing bad conduct. She takes charge of the raising of Roger’s son David and puts Roger to work in the family business, setting bounds to Roger’s crapulence but also insulating him from its consequences.

My first remarks about this theme were in a comment on episode 565:

Watching this episode, I just realized the main relationship in DARK SHADOWS- Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother. Liz and Roger are literally that, and each one’s struggle to safeguard their relationship by keeping the other in the dark about their shameful secrets is the background of every storyline in the first 209 episodes. Carolyn and David become the functional equivalent of a Bossy Big Sister and a Bratty Little Brother, and that’s the development that makes Carolyn a relatable character.

In Julia and Barnabas, we have the supreme example of such a relationship. They fall into it naturally; Julia is used to giving orders, and Barnabas is used to disobeying them. From the moment Julia lit her cigarette on the candles in the old house, she’s been Barnabas’ Bossy Big Sister, pursuing one plan after another meant for his own good. He’s been alternately pouting at her, raging against her, and clinging to her, at once resenting her demands on him and craving her validation for his narcissism. The climax of the episode, when they both know that a he-vampire is roaming about in search of a victim but it occurs to neither Julia nor Barnabas that Julia might be in danger, shows how deeply they have embedded themselves in these roles. Barnabas won’t even let Vicki walk to her car alone, and Julia, hearing the dognoise, understands why. But when Julia tells Barnabas that she will close up the lab and leave shortly after he goes out to join Willie, implying that she’s going to walk all the way back to the Great House by herself, he just leaves. Of course nothing will happen to Big Sis, she’ll always be OK.

That’s also why I don’t see how slashfic positing a sexual relationship between Barnabas and Julia can work. They are so much Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother that no matter how much time they spent telling themselves that they aren’t actually related, it would still be impossibly weird to try to be something else to each other.

I returned to the theme in a remark about episode 572, where Jonathan Frid gives a line-reading so pouty that I wonder if he was consciously trying to depict Barnabas as a bratty little brother to Julia:

I love the way Jonathan Frid pouts the line “I was afraid your visit would be pointless.” He’s every inch the bratty little brother upset that his big sister went out when he didn’t want her to go.

By episode 648, the idea has moved me to fanfic:

Cavada Humphrey looks quite a bit like Jonathan Frid. I wonder what 1795 would have been like if Barnabas had had an older sister who bossed him around, stood around during his ridiculously childish fits of petulance, occasionally acted as his conscience, and time and again serve as his enabler and protector. It would have been funny to see Grayson Hall’s Countess express disapproval of such a relationship.

Heck, that older sister could have been Sarah. Just because she’s a child in her ghost form doesn’t mean she has to have died at that age. Maybe she comes back in the form in which her relationship to her brother took its permanent shape, when she was about nine and he was about seven. Of course, that possibility is foreclosed at Sarah’s first appearance, when she tells Maggie not to let her “big brother” know she saw her, but I suppose they could have retconned that away with a phony flashback where she says “little brother.”

I revisited these points a few times- Danny’s blog consists of over a thousand posts, one each for episodes 210-1245, plus a few dozen about properties related to Dark Shadows, and each post has its own discussion thread. So it isn’t bad netiquette to repeat yourself a bit from one thread to another- there is always a chance someone who didn’t see a comment previously posted elsewhere will take an interest when you post a similar one. But I did try to keep from making a bore of myself to those who read everything.

I could have mentioned some other bossy big sister/ bratty little brother combos. In a comment on the 1897 storyline, I alluded to the relationship between Judith Collins Trask and her feckless younger brothers. Judith’s arc doesn’t really allow her to be a bossy big sister to any of her three bratty little brothers. But each of them does find himself attached to at least one woman who is stronger than he is, and who might well treat him as Elizabeth does Roger and as Julia does Barnabas.

It’s a shame Terry Crawford wasn’t a more accomplished actress in the 1960s- in the scripts Beth fluctuates between indulging Quentin in his every vice and insisting that he clean up his act. That’s the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic we’ve seen so many times, but unlike any previous pair who have enacted it Beth and Quentin are lovers and are not social equals. It would be interesting to explore the dynamic in that context, but Ms Crawford’s performance is so wooden that you sometimes have to think about her scenes after it is over and call to memory the dialogue and the visual composition before it strikes you what the point was.

Pansy Faye isn’t on the show very long, unfortunately but she’s clearly in the driver’s seat in her relationship with her thoroughly clownish husband Carl Collins. And Edward Collins is much the weaker personality in his connections with both his estranged wife Laura and with Kitty Soames. So each of those men was looking for a woman who was forceful enough to take charge of him, but indulgent enough to allow him to continue in all his established habits.

I also made only one brief reference to the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic in the discussions of the 1840 storyline. That’s rather odd- after all, in that one Julia actually presents herself to the family as Barnabas’ sister, and he is forced to go along with the pretense.

I did not refer to the theme in my comments on posts about “The Haunting of Collinwood” by the ghost of Quentin, and I made only a single reference to it in my comments on posts about the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” by the ghost of mini-Quentin Gerard. Indeed, that single reference is to Julia’s failure to focus her bossiness on Barnabas. I dropped the ball there, I think- the relationship between David and Amy in the original “Haunting of Collinwood” is at its most interesting when it mixes elements of the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic with other types of interaction, while the bland, lifeless relationships between David and Hallie on the one hand and between Tad and Carrie on the other in the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” could benefit from some kind of structure.

I also left the theme unmentioned in my comments regarding the show’s dying days, the 1841 Parallel Time storyline of episodes 1199-1245. That’s understandable- the show did not develop any bossy big sister/ bratty little brother relationships in that period. But there was an implicit one- Miss Julia Collins was the sister of Justin Collins, and she had functioned as head of the household during his years of madness. Justin dies a few episodes into the story, without sharing a scene with Julia, and she is left as a bossy big sister with no bratty brother to whom she can attach herself. Meanwhile, Bramwell is a thoroughly bratty man with no big sister. It’s rather sad for the loyal audience, having enjoyed so many scenes in which Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid had enormous fun with the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother pattern, seeing them drift separately through these dreary episodes.

The closest we get to a bossy big sister/ bratty little brother scene in the dying days of the show is also the one genuinely irresistible moment of that segment. In episode 1215, Flora Collins (Joan Bennett) and her son Morgan (Keith Prentice) are walking through the woods on their way to Biddleford’s Creek. He whines about the pointlessness of the trip, she scolds him, and we get a brilliant little glimpse of what their relationship must have been like since he first learned to talk. That authoritative mother/ whiny son moment left me, not only wanting more such scenes between them, but also wishing it had been presented in contrast with a bossy big sister/ bratty little brother relationship elsewhere in the show.

Episode 603: Television Without Pity

In which I praise three accomplished solo performances- Joan Bennett playing opposite her own voiceover, Louis Edmonds playing opposite an empty room, and Alexandra Moltke Isles playing opposite Roger Davis. 

Episode 603: Television Without Pity