The opening voiceover complains about “a frightening and violent man.” We then see a fellow with a crazed look on his face trying to break into a coffin. Assuming that he is the frightening and violent man, a first time viewer might not be especially upset when a hand darts from the coffin and chokes him, even though something like that can’t be altogether a good sign.
At a mansion identified as the great house of Collinwood, an aristocratic lady is demanding that a man in a captain’s hat account for the whereabouts of someone called Willie. The man answers to the name of Jason and calls the lady Liz. Liz has had all she can take of Willie, whoever he might be, and is not at all happy that Willie’s things are still in her house. Jason does a lot of fast talking, but cannot satisfy Liz either that Willie is really leaving or that he himself does not know where Willie is.
Jason talks with the housekeeper, a woman named Mrs Johnson. He asks her a series of questions about what she knows about Willie and she asks why he wants to know. Even though Mrs Johnson was in the room when Liz was insisting that Jason find Willie and get rid of him, for some unaccountable reason he will not tell her that he is looking for Willie.
Despite Jason’s inexplicable reticence, Mrs Johnson does tell him that Willie was preoccupied with the portrait of an eighteenth century figure named Barnabas Collins, that he was also interested in a legend that another eighteenth century personage, someone named Naomi Collins, was buried with a fortune in jewels, that Naomi Collins is buried in a tomb in a cemetery five miles north of town, and that the night before she saw Willie hanging around the toolshed. Returning viewers will recall that in yesterday’s episode, well-meaning governess Vicki had also told Jason that she had seen Willie in the vicinity of the toolshed, carrying a bag. There doesn’t seem to be a television set in the house, so everyone spends the evenings looking out the windows at the toolshed.
We see a cemetery. It soon becomes clear that it is the same cemetery we saw in the opening teaser. The gate of the tomb in which the frightening and violent man did his sinister work is swinging in the breeze. An old man in a three piece suit and celluloid collar comes upon it. He shows alarm and mutters that he can feel evil in the air.
Jason arrives at the cemetery and meets the old man. Jason says that he is looking for a friend of his, a young man. The old man identifies himself as the caretaker of the cemetery and laments the fact that a young man meeting the description Jason gives was there last night and broke the lock on the gate to the tomb. A first-time viewer’s suspicion that Willie and the frightening and violent man from the teaser are one and the same finds confirmation.
The caretaker can’t believe that Jason is unable to sense the palpable evil that emanates from the tomb. Jason overcomes the caretaker’s attempts to keep him out and makes his way into the tomb. The caretaker keeps warning Jason of the perceptible evil and Jason keeps failing to perceive it. Jason does find a cigarette on the edge of a casket in the tomb, and in closeup gives a look that can only be his recognition of a trace of Willie’s presence.
Jason finds Willie’s cigarette
Jason returns to the great house. Liz is exasperated that he still can’t tell her where Willie is, and Mrs Johnson is irritated he doesn’t put his hat and coat where they belong. After Jason and Liz have left her alone in the foyer, Mrs Johnson takes Jason’s things to the coat closet.
We see Mrs Johnson fussing with the hat and coat from inside the coat closet, an unusual perspective that has in the past been used during shots when characters have stumbled onto important evidence about whatever mystery they were puzzling over at the moment. The shot goes on long enough to lead us to wonder if Mrs Johnson is about to find something important. My wife, Mrs Acilius, mentions that each time she has seen this shot she expected Mrs Johnson to find Willie’s cigarette in Jason’s pocket and to recognize it.
Mrs Johnson fussing with Jason’s coat
That expectation is thwarted when there comes a knock at the door. Mrs Johnson answers and greets the visitor.
The next shot is from the perspective of the visitor. We see a look of astonishment on Mrs Johnson’s face as a man in a fedora and an overcoat asks to be announced to “the mistress of this house, Mrs Elizabeth Collins Stoddard.” He identifies himself as Mrs Stoddard’s cousin from England. Mrs Johnson invites the man in. He hastens across the threshold.
We cut back to the interior, and see the man and Mrs Johnson facing each other. As she bustles up the stairs, the camera tracks around to show him standing next to the portrait of Barnabas Collins, a portrait he resembles strongly. He says, “Oh, madam! If you would, you may tell her that it is Barnabas Collins.”
For regular viewers, it is refreshing to see Jason on the defensive. Ten times in the first eight episodes where they appeared together, he and Liz had a conversation in which he made a demand of her, she resisted, he threatened to expose her terrible secret, and she capitulated. Today is the second episode in which they have interacted without reenacting this drab ritual. Liz is driving the action, Jason is thinking fast, and they are each in their element. For a first time viewer wondering about the hand that came out of the coffin, it’s a lot of filler, but for those of us who have been suffering through the tedium of the blackmail plot it is a fun change of pace.
Regular viewers will also be glad to see the return of the caretaker. He appeared four times* in the storyline of Laura Murdoch Collins, the humanoid Phoenix, and managed to be simultaneously eerie and funny. His catchphrases “Died by fire!” and “The dead must rest!” are all it takes to make Mrs Acilius laugh out loud. His return in #209 moved Patrick McCray to label him a refugee from the EC comics universe, and in my post about that episode I pointed to a shot that looks so much like a panel from an EC comic book that I wonder if the similarity might have been intentional.
While first time viewers may be confused or impatient with the caretaker’s oft-repeated attempts to alert Jason to the nimbus of evil that hangs in the air around him, regular viewers know that the caretaker is the one who understands the show he is on. Jason thinks that he’s on a noir crime drama, and indeed there had been a period when Dark Shadows just about met that description.
But for months now, all the action has been pointing towards the supernatural back-world behind the visible setting. Jason’s own storyline was introduced the very day Laura’s ended, and it is a means for wrapping up all the non-supernatural narrative elements still lying around. Jason’s insensibility to the evil in the tomb is not only a sign that he is himself too corrupt to tell the difference between a wholesome space and a cursed one, but also that he doesn’t fit into the genre where Dark Shadows will be from now on. The audience in 1967 wouldn’t have known that actor Dennis Patrick always insisted on fixing a date for his departure when he joined the cast of a daytime soap, but this scene should give them a strong indication that Jason McGuire is not to be with us indefinitely.
Patrick McCray’s commentary on this episode includes an analysis of director John Sedwick’s visual strategy in the last two shots, those in which Jonathan Frid first appears as Barnabas Collins. McCray confines himself to the first thing photography students are usually taught, the “Rule of Thirds.” But that’s all it takes to get us to look closely at the imagery and to see how Sedwick tells his story with pictures:
Two clear and subtly clever images with a bridge. His introduction comes from his own perspective, rather than Mrs. Johnson’s. It’s an exterior shot of the entrance, looking in.
The grid helps us divide the image. People in the west read from left to right, and tend to circle in our gaze back to the left. Sedwick uses this model of composition in all three shots. In image 1, we see someone — him? — through the eyes of Mrs. Johnson as the camera hangs over his shoulder, minimizing her (1.1). Why is she so transfixed? We follow her gaze up to the towering figure (1.2). Following the slope of his collar, we come back to Mrs. Johnson… specifically, her throat (1.3). After that, we circle back up to her gaze, even more worried. For what reason?
Then he enters with purpose, and we next see him again from the back, divesting himself of his cane and hat, getting a glimpse of his strangely antique cloak. His voice is rich with a uniquely tentative sense of authority. We still don’t see his face, just bits of his profile. These moments tease us, and yet they put us in the position of a confidant of the vampire’s. The composition mirrors what we saw outside. Within, Mrs. Johnson (2.1) is minimized, and the turn in the figure shows him looming, ready to pounce. Again, we begin with her, following her gaze from left to right. The mystery of what bedevils her, bedevils us, as well. The man towers (2.2) in the right, blocking the exit. Instead of following a sloping collar, we follow its larger, expanding offspring in the cape, which takes us circling to the left again where we stop on the poor, miniscule shield of his hat and then, like a wolf pulling her away, his feral looking cane (2.3).
Situated so close to the predator, with his gaze elsewhere, we have a strange safety. We don’t see him from the eyes of his prey. Instead, we are a quietly unacknowledged friend. Finally, as Mrs. Johnson goes to summon Elizabeth, the figure turns to face the portrait, rotating upstage to let us see him from profile to profile. As she exits, and we are alone with him, the chiseled face comes into focus from the side. It is alien. It is familiar. We think we know why, but then we see why. They are only face to face for a moment before the camera takes us away from him and uncomfortably close to the painting from 1795, cold and haughty and haggard and sad. He then steps even uncomfortably closer to it and spins to give his inevitable name. We see the two men in mutual relief.
The painting of Barnabas is a prisoner in a four-sided frame on the wall, disapproving and distant as the first thing our eyes rest on (3.1). Is the painting gazing at the man? No. The more we look, the more the painting is gazing at us, as if we’ve been caught looking. It’s natural to avert our eyes from this, and by comparison, section 3.2 is practically benevolent. His impossible doppelganger is standing before it in three dimensions on our 2D screen. Liberated, he smiles, and there is something optimistic about it. He’s gazing upward to the landing, yes, but it’s also to the future. Gazing left, he’s anticipating the next image rather than look for one that has passed. Subtly, our eyes wander down to 3.3, his medal, a subtle reminder that, despite his strange warmth, he’s a soldier as well, and a force to be reckoned with.
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.
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.
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 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.
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, I picked up on one of Danny’s favorite topics, gay subtext in Dark Shadows. Usually I claimed that there was even more of this in the show than he identified.
Danny writes intricate, deeply considered analyses of episodes 210 through 1245 of Dark Shadows. He does not cover episodes 1-209, and frequently claims that there are many episodes among them he has never seen. He does refer several times to a plot point that stretched across many episodes in those 42 weeks, the story of Roger Collins and his obsessive interest in where Burke Devlin’s pen is. Burke has sworn to expose the nature of his former relationship with Roger, exposure which Roger fears will lead to his disgrace and imprisonment.
Driven by that fear, Roger alternately takes and loses Burke’s pen. He keeps returning to where the pen is, and his obsessive attention to the pen, moving it from one hiding place to another, holding it in his hands, staring at it, shifting it between his coat pocket and his pants pocket, dropping it out of his clothes to a place where people can see it, putting it in darkened corners of his house, burying it in the soil of the grounds of his home, digging it up again to put it in yet another place, leads directly to his arrest. Danny does not appear to find any gay subtext in this, even in the post in which he gives synopses of 21 episodes where Burke’s pen is the main theme. Instead, Burke’s pen is, for him, a symbol of the dangerous boring-ness of the first 42 weeks of the show. For an audience in 1966, watching what was at that point a rather ambitiously literate show and living in a country where Freudianism was enormously influential, I suspect a man obsessed with where another man’s pen is would have seemed likely to be dealing with psychological issues concerning male genitalia, even if he weren’t played by Louis Edmonds.
Though there may not be any posts about the first 209 episodes, the comment threads range over the whole series and over topics far beyond it. So, the Burke/ Roger relationship came up in a thread responding to Danny’s post on episode 1008. In response to that discussion, I wrote the following:
There is a dispute among the characters as to whether Burke or Roger was driving when the car hit Hanson. This hardly matters. It was Burke’s car, and even if he gave the keys to Roger, he would have done so knowing that Roger was as drunk and as unfit to drive as he was. A fact like that wouldn’t necessarily have kept Burke out of jail even if it were known at the time, and ten years later, after witnesses’ memories had faded, physical evidence had been lost, and statutes of limitations had expired, the whole basis of the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline is sheer nonsense.
But let’s look at another question about the identities of the people in that car. The public story is that the three people in it were a pair of lovers and their friend, and that after the collision the lovers broke up and one of them ended up married to the friend. Maybe that’s true- but maybe the lovers were Roger and Burke, and Laura was the friend who was along for the ride. That’s the secret Roger is so desperate to cover up when Burke comes back to town.
It also explains why Burke “investigates” the matter personally, rather than handing it over to the high-priced private investigating firms the show goes out of its way to tell us he is in the habit of retaining. He isn’t trying to uncover established facts about the past- he’s trying to fabricate a new past, in which will stand a different sort of relationship than the one he and Roger actually shared. Perhaps, as a deeply closeted 1960s guy, Devlin has it in mind to remake the past so that he and Roger did not have a sexual relationship at all; by rewriting his history with Roger, he may hope to free himself of his same-sex desires and the threat they pose to his macho identity. Perhaps, at another level of his mind, he wants to free himself, not of his desires, but of that macho identity, and of the social norms and personal inhibitions that keep him from living openly as a gay man. In that way, Burke is the first of Dark Shadows’ would-be time travelers, embarking on a quest to erase a past he cannot tolerate and to replace it with one that will enable him to have a sustainable set of intimate relationships.
This would also explain Burke’s attitude towards other major characters. Carolyn and Laura are nothing to him but weapons to use against Roger and instruments to use in inscribing a new past. His relationship with Vicki doesn’t really get started until there’s no reason for either of them to be on the show anymore; it’s boring for that reason, but if we think of Burke using Vicki as a beard we can find an interest in its very lifelessness.
Moreover, we can connect Burke’s closeted homosexuality to his weirdly feckless efforts against Barnabas. He never figures out what Barnabas is, but he immediately sees what Barnabas is not- that is, he is not trying to be a perfect example of Heterosexual Male, 1960s edition. He responds to Barnabas with undisguised loathing, but not with any real jealousy about his attentions to Vicki. It’s Barnabas’ freedom from convention that he envies. Once we postulate a B/R sexual relationship before the crash that killed Hanson, we can draw a direct line from Burke’s return to town in episode 1 to the night he spent hiding behind a tree near the Old House waiting to see Barnabas come and go in episode 304.
I suppose there might be a reason they chose the name “Burke Devlin” for the character- not only was the actor who played “Burke Devlin” in the film “The Tarnished Angels” Rock Hudson, but that Burke Devlin is involved in a love triangle in which his strongest feelings seem to be for the husband of the woman with whom he is ostensibly involved. That Devlin is at first fascinated by the husband, has a falling-out with him, then turns his attentions to the wife.
So far, this has been the gayest storyline the show has taken on yet.
In 899, the sailor offers to buy Paul a drink, and Paul shouts “I buy my own drinks!” This isn’t subtext- any man getting that reaction in a bar will know that the other fellow has interpreted his offer as including more than the drink. Paul apologizes and becomes friendly, indicating that he is willing to abandon that interpretation and set aside the hostility that accompanied it.
In this episode, we’re back in the same bar. Barnabas beckons Paul to his table with his index finger. I invite any man who doesn’t think we are intended to read this as a reference to a sexual come-on to try that move on a homophobic tough guy in a bar.
Paul’s face shows his inner struggle as he tries to resist Barnabas’ advances, but he can’t. Barnabas coaxes him into reminiscing about yet another night in the same bar, when a casual encounter with yet another guy led to something that seemed at the time like a little harmless tomfoolery, but that has now grown into a threat to his relationship with his family, his standing in the community, his physical well-being, and everything else.
Every time Barnabas addresses Philip as “Philip,” I see a little twinkle in Jonathan Frid’s eyes. By 1969, female impersonators had been imitating Bette Davis’ commands to Leslie Howard in OF HUMAN BONDAGE, where his character’s name is “Philip,” for thirty years. I knew gay men who were still making each other laugh as late as the 1980s by quoting lines beginning “Philip!” If Bernau hadn’t stayed so perfectly in character, I doubt Frid would have been able to keep from a giggling fit that would have brought the house down.
Christopher Bernau’s decision to play an antique dealer using a voice and mannerisms derived from a Jack Benny imitation led many of Danny’s commenters to bring up Bernau’s own sexuality and wonder whether he was simply incapable of staying in the closet. As it sometimes does in discussions of obviously gay actors playing men partnered with women on American TV in this period, The Paul Lynde Show (1972-1973) came up. I had altogether too much to say about this:
The reference to Paul Lynde in the original post reminds me of THE PAUL LYNDE SHOW, a sitcom which aired on ABC in the 1972-1973 season. It’s a fascinating artifact. Lynde’s character has a wife and two daughters. The opening sequence sets the tone- it flashes through several readily identifiable scenario (falling off a bicycle, etc) which end with Lynde falling into one or another kind of trap. Lynde plays each of those little vignettes with the same series of expressions on his face, the first a grim look of deep-seated misery, the last an explosion of panic. Each episode focuses on Lynde’s character stumbling into some kind of excruciatingly awkward situation, suffering through a rapidly escalating series of embarrassments, and finally escaping from it with his dignity annihilated but his wife and daughters feeling sorry for him.
It’s routine for people to cite that show as an example of how clueless the entertainment industry and the public who consumed its products were about gay people in the old days, but it is so plausible a version of what it might have been like for Paul Lynde to have married a woman that can’t imagine it wasn’t intentional on some level. You can read it as an exploration of a gay man and a woman who’ve ended up married to each other for whatever reason, and who have resolved to do what they can to make a marriage work. After all, they like each other, they want their daughters to know where home is, and they have a position to maintain within the community. They show the result as something that’s pretty nearly tolerable for all concerned, but at no point does it look like something great. Lynde’s daily frustrations, confusions, and humiliations are the basis of the comedy, but they could just as easily have been explored in a drama that makes their source explicit. It certainly gives academics interested in Queer Theory a lot to write about.
If the public wasn’t in fact as oblivious to gayness as is sometimes suggested, it would have been even more daring- or more clueless- to cast Christopher Bernau as a married man than you suggest. Especially so considering that he’s supposed to be an antique dealer, an occupation often stereotyped as a province of gay men. His performance in this episode is not as obviously gay as was his performance in episode 890- even if you were in an all-male porn video, it would be a challenge to be as obviously gay as Bernau is in episode 890- but it’s pretty darned flamboyant.
Maybe they had seen so many other gay actors play heterosexual characters convincingly enough that it didn’t occur to them that he would have a problem. Joel Crothers has been mentioned several times, but I would also bring up Louis Edmonds. As Edward Collins, he is perfectly credible in his scenes with Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Kitty Soames. And as Roger in 1966, he was credible both as a slimy guy coming on to Vicki and as the estranged husband of Laura.
The Leviathans storyline was followed by the 1970 Parallel Time storyline, to which I usually refer as “Meet Another Angelique.” The A-story throughout that segment is an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. I engaged in a bit of imaginary recasting concerning that story:
Daphne du Maurier was bisexual, and a lot of people have written a lot of criticism of REBECCA based on the idea that what drove de Winter to kill his wife was that she was sleeping with women as well as with other men.
I’m skeptical about that interpretation. Maybe du Maurier had planned to put that in the book, but once the story turned out to be about the second Mrs de Winter’s struggle with feelings of inadequacy, the events that actually took place between Rebecca and Maxim during their marriage are relegated to a secondary importance. As for Mrs Danvers, the most important thing about her in the novel is her ambiguity. The second Mrs de Winter is terrified of her, but she would be terrified of anyone. Since she is the narrator, we have no way of knowing what Mrs Danvers is actually thinking or doing.
Of course, Hitchcock and Judith Anderson made Mrs Danvers’ erotic attachment to Rebecca the central theme of the movie. The second Mrs de Winter finds that Maxim has become unavailable to her as soon as they arrived at Manderley. The only powerful emotion she encounters anywhere in her new environment is Mrs Danvers’ passionate attachment to Rebecca. That passion is just one more thing she can’t understand.
Grayson Hall is good as Hoffman, but I wish Clarice Blackburn had played the housekeeper. First, because she joined the cast thinking that Mrs Johnson would be based on Mrs Danvers, so that she had spent a few years preparing for the role. Second, she was in real life partnered with a woman, so it would have been good to see an actual lesbian play a homoerotic-inflected role.
Dark Shadows Commentary 