marc masse – Page 2 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 54: A proper charge

At the end of yesterday’s episode, dour caretaker Matthew admitted to reclusive matriarch Liz that he had found a drowned man on the beach, that the man was missing plant manager Bill Malloy, and that he had pushed the body out to sea and watched it float away. Liz then called the sheriff.

As today’s episode opens, Liz’ ne-er-do-well brother Roger doesn’t know about Matthew’s confession. We see him in his office, countermanding orders Bill Malloy had given and acting like he has Malloy’s job. On his blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning, Marc Masse interprets this as an indication of guilty knowledge on Roger’s part:

Roger has evidently just implemented a new system that has effectively replaced Bill Malloy’s previous methods for operations at the plant. This indicates that Roger knows for certain that Malloy will not be returning as plant manager, which enshrouds him with an additional layer of suspicion given how as of the close of episode 53 only two people knew for certain that Bill Malloy was in fact dead: Matthew Morgan and Elizabeth Stoddard, and as of today’s episode the sheriff. Roger will be informed of Malloy’s demise later on that day when his sister calls him away from the office to have him return to Collinwood, and Roger will feign surprise upon hearing the news, but it’s evident from his phone conversation above that he was somehow already aware of Malloy’s fate.

That’s a possible interpretation, and I certainly thought of it the first time I saw the episode. On the other hand, Malloy has been missing for more than a day, and was last seen drinking in a bar. So even if he were to walk in the door in prime physical condition at this very moment, he would be in a poor position to defend himself in workplace politics. Roger could easily claim that he was simply moving to fill a vacuum. The show is keeping Roger viable as a suspect, but is not committing itself to the idea that he is the guilty party.

Whatever Roger knows about the situation, dashing action hero Burke knows less. But Burke seems to think of himself as very knowledgeable. He storms into Roger’s office and confronts him with the fact that Malloy was trying to prove that Roger, not Burke, was responsible for the killing that sent Burke to prison years before. Burke makes many accusations against Roger, some of which the audience knows to be true, but none of which he is yet in a position to prove.

The scenes in Roger’s office are intercut with scenes in the drawing room in the mansion at Collinwood. There, the sheriff is talking with Liz and Matthew about Matthew’s confession. Matthew asks the sheriff if he will be arrested now. To which the sheriff replies, “I can’t think of a proper charge.” He jokes about “burial without a license,” then goes on to warn Matthew that he has laid himself open to suspicion.

This is a moment when you can tell you’re watching a show made in 1966. Seven years later, coverage of investigations into the Watergate affair would give the American public an intensive eighteen-month tutorial in criminal law concerning obstruction of justice and related offenses. Ever since that time, residents of the USA have known that you are risking jail any time you make things difficult for the police. Prior to that, however, this was not well-known even among lawyers who practiced in areas other than criminal law.

Watergate itself illustrated this. Several of the major figures in that matter were lawyers, and many of them, including Richard Nixon himself, genuinely did not know that it was an offense for a person who had not been involved in a crime to cover that crime up. You can hear Nixon on the White House tapes telling his legal aide John Dean that because Dean didn’t know about the Watergate burglary in advance, the things Dean had done to hinder the investigation of the burglary can’t possibly put him in danger of prosecution. In his memoirs, Dean admits his own ignorance of the relevant law, confessing that he first read the federal statutes on obstruction of justice not when he was in law school, not when he was studying for the bar, not when he was a staffer for a commission tasked with rewriting the federal criminal code, but in his office at the White House, after he’d been running the Watergate cover-up for nine months. He reports in that same book that several other White House staffers who were lawyers shared his ignorance. Many of them would go on to confirm this aspect of his account.

In light of the legal education that Watergate provided the people of the USA, the sheriff sounds like an idiot. That same education ruined other old shows. Perry Mason, for example- ridiculous as it is that every episode ends with the guilty party jumping up in court and shouting “I did it!,” if you’re into the story you feel enough poetic justice in those endings that they don’t really bother you. But Mason himself can hardly make it through five minutes without committing every crime with which Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean would be charged and a few more besides. Perry Mason broadcast its final episode in May of 1966, so that show, not the Watergate news, was the law school the original audience had attended.

Miscellaneous:

The episode opens with footage of Louis Edmonds walking around outdoors on a waterfront. They play some nice sound effects of sea-birds over it.

The sheriff we see in this episode is Sheriff Patterson, the first of that name. He is played by Dana Elcar, a fine actor who would be ubiquitous on American television and cinema screens in the 1980s. If we’re heading into a major story arc dominated by a mystery story, it’s a relief to know that the policeman role will be in such trustworthy hands. The part will be re-cast many times in the years to come, and never again as well. Then again, none of the subsequent Sheriffs Patterson will be as important as is this first.

Since there is a good deal of overlap between fans of Star Trek and fans of Dark Shadows, I might mention that this was the episode that aired on the day Star Trek premiered.

There was a great deal of Anglophilia involved in the making of Dark Shadows: the mid-Atlantic accents, the plots lifted from English literature, etc. So it may not be a coincidence that a dark-haired, small-chinned matriarch named Elizabeth presides over the family at the center of it. Indeed, Joan Bennett looked enough like the northern European royals that when they wanted to cast an actress who resembled her closely enough to set the audience wondering how their characters were related, they settled on the daughter of a Danish count. So I might also mention that I am writing this on the day Britain’s Elizabeth II died.

There are two big flubs. At one point when they’re about to cut from the drawing room back to the office, we hear a loud noise and some garbled voices in the background. My wife, Mrs Acilius, wondered if this was Josette Collins trying to make herself heard.

At the very end of the episode, as announcer Bob Lloyd is intoning “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production,” a figure walks in front of the camera. You can just see the top of his head. The Dark Shadows wiki refers to the figure as “a crew member.” Marc Masse says it’s probably Mitch Ryan. John and Christine Scoleri speculate on their blog Dark Shadows Before I Die that it might be Dan Curtis himself. To me it looks like more the hairdo Thayer David is wearing as Matthew Morgan than like either Ryan’s hairdo as Burke or Dan Curtis’ hair- there seems to be some grey in it, and it looks to be more matted than either wavy or curly.

Episode 52: The very atmosphere

We intercut between two contrasting scenes: in the mansion at Collinwood, Vicki the governess and Carolyn the heiress pour their hearts out to each other, while in the Evans cottage drunken artist Sam refuses to answer any of the questions his adult daughter Maggie puts to him.

The disappearance of doughty plant manager Bill Malloy looms over both conversations. Vicki and Carolyn can’t avoid the conclusion that the body they saw face-down on the beach at the end of Friday’s episode was Malloy’s. Sam tells Maggie that the reason he can’t sleep is that he’s worried about Malloy.

The two settings connect when Sam telephones Collinwood in hopes the dastardly Roger will answer. The call prompts Vicki and Carolyn to break up their slumber party in Vicki’s room and come to the telephone outside the drawing room.

Vicki answers the telephone. Sam says “Collins,” Vicki asks to whom she is speaking, he hangs up. They then hear a noise from inside the drawing room. They go in and search to see if anyone is hiding there. Vicki goes directly to the window and pays special attention to the area behind the curtain on her right, a spot that will become a frequent hiding place much later in the series. I suppose it makes sense that people would eventually start hiding there- the camera has a great angle on it. Smart of Vicki to know that’s the first place to look.

The girls find a book open on the floor. Vicki demonstrates that the noise they heard was the sound of the book falling, but she cannot explain how it moved several feet from the table where it was kept to the spot where she and Carolyn found it. Carolyn insists that they consider the possibility that a ghost put it there. Since they had heard the same sound at least once while they were still in Vicki’s room, it would make sense to consider that someone or something must have been involved in picking it up and dropping it again.

Vicki holds the book several feet from the table — Screenshot by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

Vicki and Carolyn leave the drawing room, and we see the book reopen itself to the same page. The camera zooms in, and we see that the page bears the name and likeness of Josette Collins. This is the first supernatural manifestation that the audience sees when no character is looking. We’ve been hearing about the ghost of Josette Collins from week one; we have to assume that she is leaving us her carte de visite.

The book opens by itself — Screen capture by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

Each of the previous supernatural manifestations had marked a moment when off-screen events were stirring up the spirits that inhabit the back-world behind the universe the characters inhabit. When troubled rich boy David had tampered with the brakes on his father Roger’s car in an attempt at patricide, reclusive matriarch Liz was asleep and ghosts were trying to reach her in her dreams. That same night, Vicki saw a door open and close itself inexplicably, and saw a shrouded figure on the threshold of the drawing room. At the beginning of this episode, Carolyn admitted to Vicki that while Collinwood has always been a strange place, it was only when she and Burke came to town that the really weird stuff started happening. So we have to take it that Vicki’s presence in the house is itself a matter of concern to Josette and the other ghosts, and that what is happening off-screen in connection with the body on the beach and the secrets Sam refuses to share with Maggie are going to bring the phantoms out of the back-world into the foreground.

It’s also interesting that the first character we see after the ghost of Josette announces herself is Maggie. At this point and for some months to come, the show will be developing a connection between Vicki and the ghost of Josette. But later on, both Maggie the character and Kathryn Leigh Scott the actress will be very much involved with Josette. The series involved very little advance planning, nothing at all like daytime serials of the present day that have their stories sketched out in detail months in advance, so that is probably just something you’d expect to happen when you only have four actors in the studio. Still it’s an eldritch moment for repeat viewers.

Within the context of the show as it actually was at this period, I think there is a point to the juxtaposition of the ghost of Josette with the scene between Maggie and Sam in the Evans cottage. Vicki and Carolyn are girls at a slumber party scaring each other with ghost stories. Even when the slumber party takes place in a mansion on a great estate belonging to the family that gave the town its name, that’s a silly situation. When the ghost stories turn out to be true, though, you’re suddenly vaulted into an elevated realm of fantasy. Turn to a small house where the adult child of an alcoholic is wearing her late mother’s night-gown and trying fruitlessly to prise some useful information out of her drunken parent, and you land back in the real world with a thud. Nothing here seems to be either silly or fantastic. Sam’s association with Roger’s secret, and therefore with the unknown events that are roiling the supernatural world, suggests that the mundane struggles of the Evanses and the fantastic doings at Collinwood will sooner or later collapse into each other.

I should mention Marc Masse’s post about this episode on his always intriguing, usually inaccessible blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning. Masse meticulously demonstrates the influence of the 1944 film The Uninvited on the show in general and this episode in particular with close analysis and multiple screenshots, and then does the same thing with an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called “The Gentleman from America.” It’s a very impressive and thoroughly convincing work of scholarship.

Masse’s blog is infamous among many Dark Shadows fans because of what he presents as transcripts of conversations between director Lela Swift, executive producer Dan Curtis, and others that he claims were picked up by the control room microphone and that he has recovered by some more or less magical technique unknown to other audio technicians. In this one he includes such a “transcript,” in which Swift (who didn’t direct this episode, but is supposed to be in the control room anyway) tells Curtis that she thinks it’s a terrible idea to do a ghost story or a Hitchcock story on daytime TV.

That installment of “The Dan and Lela Show” is pretty tedious to read, but in a way it’s a relief. In previous posts Masse has presented Swift as maniacally driven by lust for the female cast members, a presentation that her husband and their children might have found surprising. His post for episode 48 brings that presentation to a sort of crescendo. Since this one includes two shots of Vicki and Carolyn in bed together, I braced myself for Masse to outdo himself in that line, but there isn’t a bit of it there.

Episode 42: The anticipation of doing it

In these early months of the show, the Collinses are in danger of running out of money and losing their position. In yesterday’s episode, we learned that Roger blew his half of the inheritance and Liz drew heavily on hers to keep the business in the family; in this one, we learn that the house is a moldering ruin and the rest of the family’s assets are leveraged to the hilt. Burke plans to take his revenge in part by buying up their debts and making himself their master, which it appears he is in a position to do.

Burke and his investigator are at a table in a restaurant in Bangor when they discuss these matters. Carolyn has followed Burke to the restaurant. Burke spots her, invites her to his table, and sends the investigator away. Burke flirts with Carolyn as he makes sure she didn’t overhear any important information. He makes a show of his elaborately filigreed pen. When she admires it, he makes a gift of it to her.

The last time Carolyn made her way to Burke’s luncheon table, she played with her ring, called his attention to it, and left it behind as a deliberate stratagem to prompt him to call her. She seemed altogether unconcerned with the fact that the ring was a gift from Burke’s sworn enemy, her Uncle Roger, even after Burke indicated that he found it significant; and went ahead to keep an appointment to get the ring back from Burke even after Burke had given it to Roger and Roger had returned it to her. This strange obliviousness in all things having to do with Roger recalls the equally strange blitheness with which Carolyn told Vicki about her crush on her Uncle Roger when they first met “he sends me, he really does!”)

This time the object that passes from one to the other is another distinctive bit of metal associated with some important relationships. Burke tells Carolyn how few pens there are like it in the world, that he had them made to distinguish their bearers as key people in his life. When he makes the pen a gift to Carolyn, he implies that what he is giving her is not just a thing, but a new connection between them.

I made some remarks about these scenes in a comment on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die:

Carolyn comes to Burke’s table at one restaurant and leaves a special ring with him; she comes to his table at another restaurant and he gives a special pen to her. Even if the mid-60s weren’t the Age of Freud among intellectually ambitious people in the USA, the flirty tone of the two encounters would make it difficult not to see these tokens as body part symbols.

…As for the pen, it is going to become a more and more unmistakable phallic symbol over the next several weeks, leading us to wonder what the show is trying to tell us about the relationship between Burke and Roger and what was really going on between them before that accident ten years ago.

There’s also a scene between Sam and Liz. Yesterday’s episode ended with a big cliffhanger when Liz opened the doors and saw Sam waiting outside, suggesting that he is going to unburden himself of the secret he and Roger share. In true soap opera fashion, once the cliffhanger has brought the audience back to watch the next episode it has served its purpose. It is then to be got out of the way as quickly and anticlimactically as possible.

Today’s anticlimax sheds an unexpected light on Sam’s position. Sam’s extreme reluctance to tell his secret grew out of his assumption that whenever and wherever he started talking, he would find a hyper-attentive audience who would listen to his his every word and lose no time putting them into far-reaching and disastrous action. What he actually meets in Liz is personal dislike for him and impatience with anything he might want to say. Once Sam starts to talk about Roger, she assumes he has come to blackmail her with some sordid information about her no-good brother, and she makes it clear she will not be having it. Joe comes to the house, Liz mentions Bill, and Sam crumbles, his secret untold and unwanted. If the audience is expecting Sam to murdered, this result will add an extra touch of bathos to his plight- a man carrying a secret that spells his doom, but that does not attract the attention of a suitable listener.

Ray Stewart, later to gain a place in history as part of the gay couple on Barney Miller, appears in this episode as a featured extra. He’s the head-waiter in the restaurant in Bangor. Both the Dark Shadows wiki and his imdb page list his role as “Customer,” but here you see him telling the server which table to go to first:

Screenshot by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

And here you see him greeting Carolyn when she arrives at the restaurant:

Ray Stewart is still alive, maybe he should complain about his role being mislabeled. In all seriousness, I’d like to see him and other onetime background players on one of those panel discussions they used to have at Dark Shadows cons and now have on Zoom. I’d like to know what it was like being an extra on the show. And of course some of them went on to become big names.

Episode 39: Questions don’t mean a thing

Yesterday’s episode was a relaunch of the series, with a new actor (a new kind of actor, in fact) as Matthew Morgan, an exposition of the Revenge of Burke Devlin story so straightforward as to include a bibliography of its origins, an emphatic closing of the Who Failed to Kill Roger? story, and a checklist of the other narrative threads in progress. The relaunch continues today, with an established character re-introduced as a potential action hero.

That character is Bill Malloy (Frank Schofield.) Bill is first seen with Liz in her sanctum, the drawing room at Collinwood. She is approving his plan to dramatically improve the capital plant of the cannery without laying off any employees. He tells her about Burke’s investigations of the family’s debts. Regular viewers know that this investigation was a deep secret, and that only a capable businessman could have learned what Bill knows about it. The scene itself makes it clear that it is difficult to get Liz to face facts about the threat Burke poses, and that Bill is equal to that challenge.

Roger is at the Evans cottage, demanding Sam back out of painting Burke’s portrait, hiding in the bathroom and listening at the door when Burke comes and poses, emerging to threaten him after Burke leaves. Sam is helpless to get rid of Roger, Roger is helpless to control Burke, Burke is helpless to get Sam to start talking. Burke leaves the cottage to meet Bill at the restaurant.

The restaurant is in the Collinsport Inn, Burke’s home base. So far Burke has maintained the upper hand in most encounters there. Even when Matthew came to the restaurant yesterday and informed Burke that he might kill him, Burke kept his wits about him. But when Bill and Burke sit down together, Bill drives the conversation from beginning to end. Bill asks Burke to leave town, and declares his opposition to whatever plan he may have to harm Liz, Carolyn, or David. In return for Burke’s backing off, Bill offers to help him clear his name, presumably at Roger’s expense. Thus Bill breathes new life into the Revenge of Burke Devlin story- no longer is it a static confrontation between dashing but stymied Burke and charismatic but despicable Roger. Now the action is coming from a third, independent, corner.

Back in the Evans cottage, Sam and Roger are reprising their mutual helplessness, when Bill walks through the open door. Roger has just been yammering on at length about the information he doesn’t want Sam to give Burke. As the credits start to roll, we are wondering how long Bill was standing there and whether he has already learned everything Burke has spent all this time trying to uncover and Roger to hide.

Episode 37: Fatigue lines

Roger’s mounting anxiety about what Burke may learn from Sam leads him to alternate in each scene between yelling and begging. Depicting this, Louis Edmonds’ chews the scenery so hard that he momentarily loses track of Roger’s mid-Atlantic accent and slips into his native Louisiana drawl, yelling at Vicki “Jes supposin’ you a-tell me how long you wah standin’ in that doah-way?” Perhaps this is Marc Masse’s “David Ford Effect”– Ford came to the show from a long engagement as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, maybe they’ve decided to transport Collinsport from Maine to the Mississippi Delta.

At the Evans cottage, Sam gives Maggie a sealed envelope to be opened in event of his death. Maggie is bewildered and upset. Surmising that her father’s trouble is to do with Collinwood, she wishes that the mansion would burn to the ground. Sam waxes philosophical, opining that “Ghosts of the past don’t live inside a home. They live inside each man. They fight for his soul.. twist it into something unrecognizable.”

Moments later we find out that Sam is wrong, ghosts totally live inside a home. In the middle of the night, Vicki is awakened by the same strange sobbing she had heard in episode 4. She follows it to the basement. Last time she was in the basement, in episode 6, Matthew found her there and spoke sharply to her. Now Roger finds her there and yells at her. As she had stood up to Roger in the drawing room earlier, so she stands up to him now. After their showdown, he even admits that he has heard the sobbing woman many times, and says that she may be “one of our ghosts.”

I divide the series into several periods, the first of which I call “Meet Vicki.” The major story-lines of the Meet Vicki period are all in a down-cycle during this episode. Roger’s panic and Sam’s melancholy are part of the Revenge of Burke Devlin story, but Roger’s activities today do nothing to advance that story, and Sam’s letter will become one of the most tedious MacGuffins in a series that is notorious for forcing the audience to sit through overlong contemplation of its MacGuffins. Roger’s angry reaction to finding Vicki in the basement touches on the Mystery of the Locked Room, which is connected with the question of why Liz became a recluse. Those stories haven’t advanced for weeks. The sobbing woman revives the question of whether the house is haunted. While Roger’s admission that he has heard the sobbing marks the first time one character knows what another is talking about concerning the ghostly happenings, it does not prompt any further action. The question of Vicki’s origins is at a stalemate, the romance between Carolyn and Joe is dead in the water, and David is so alienated right now that they can’t do much with Vicki’s attempts to befriend him.

So the Meet Vicki period has reached a dead end. Tomorrow we’re going to meet someone else, and a new period is going to begin.

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

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

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

Masse writes:

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

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

“A façade, my dear boy!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 33: The one with Harvey Keitel

At Collinwood, Liz tells Carolyn that David won’t be going away just because he tried to murder his father. “Things will go on just as before.” On the other hand, Carolyn should marry Joe and leave the house, because “You’re the only one of us who can have a sane, happy life.” I suppose we’ve all seen that in real life, someone swinging wildly between deep denial and exaggerated despair. Two forms of learned helplessness, I guess.

At the Blue Whale, Joe is getting well and truly sloshed. Burke joins him at his table, interrupting a conversation between Joe and his whiskey glass. Joe tells Burke that he doesn’t like him, expresses his frustration with Carolyn’s refusal to get married, then goes to Collinwood, roaring drunk, and tells Carolyn, Liz, and Vicki what he thinks of them.

One thing Joe thinks is that Carolyn is doomed to be a spinster. Considering that she’s supposed to be about seventeen, that does call to mind Barnabas’ line to Carolyn in the 2012 Dark Shadows movie, “Fifteen? And no husband?”

Marc Masse brings this point out well on his Dark Shadows from the Beginning, and argues that the depiction of Carolyn may be one of the things that sunk the show with young viewers between the end of the first month and the introduction of the vampire:

You have to wonder what kind of impression the character of Carolyn Stoddard would have made to young viewers in 1966. Here she is having grown up in a mansion with forty rooms and her only option in life is to be married off before her eighteenth birthday to a local fisherman, or else face a life of lonely spinsterhood. In that respect, Dark Shadows seems to belong to the sensibilities of previous decades.

This paragraph is part of an in-depth discussion of Dark Shadows’ place on ABC’s schedule, its ratings, the show that preceded it in its time-slot, and Art Wallace’s rather antiquated view of the world. It’s all very informative, highly recommended.

When Joe passes out on the couch, Vicki goes to town. She goes to the Blue Whale, where Burke asks if she’s looking for someone. “I just found him,” she replies. Obviously, she’s talking about Harvey Keitel, who is dancing a few feet away from her.

That Harvey Keitel was once an extra on Dark Shadows is pretty interesting. If he took that job, clearly he would have taken a speaking part. I gave some thought to parts I wish he had taken in comments on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day four times: here (on episode 470,) here (on episode 769,) here (on episode 1057,) and here (on episode 1137.)

Episode 28: Just curious

I think I said everything I wanted to say about this one in the comment I left on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die. So here it is:

“Idiot Plot” is a term for a story that can go on only if the characters in it are dumber than the average member of the audience. When Vicki left the valve where David could steal it in episode 26, Dark Shadows had its first Idiot Plot.

Now, just two days later, we have our second. The restaurant is open for business, and Maggie says in so many words that Roger is a frequent customer there. So he should walk right in and lay hold of David. But unaccountably, he waits for Maggie to let him in. She turns her back on David, calls Roger by name, and declares that she’s been tricking David into staying, all while David is a few feet away. Even worse, we have a number of scenes suggesting that Maggie had searched the hotel extensively for David and failed to find him, when he was simply hiding in the very telephone booth she herself had used a few minutes before.

Art Wallace is the only credited writer for the first eight weeks of the show. I’m sure he had some help, but not enough, apparently- these two episodes not only disappoint viewers who expect a well-constructed drama, but also do serious harm to the characters of Vicki and Maggie. Vicki has to be so sweet and innocent that unless she’s also as smart as she’s seemed in the first five weeks, she’ll get pretty cloying pretty fast. And Maggie, whether it’s the original wised-up dame who’s everybody’s pal but nobody’s friend or her successor, the nicest girl in town, has to produce witty dialogue and see through people’s attempts to deceive her if she’s to contribute to the story. Casting either of them as Designated Idiot is a sure way to put her on an ice floe to oblivion.

Two other things:

Interesting to see the first scene between Maggie and David. Especially so knowing that these characters will become important to each other later on, but already so as confirmation that the hostility Maggie had expressed towards the Collinses in general in Episode 1 isn’t going to define her character.

The picture of Lyndon Johnson in the sheriff’s office is apparently there to promote ABC’s coverage of the Luci Johnson’s wedding that weekend, but it’s a very odd choice of image. You’d expect the president’s photograph in a government office to show him from the chest up, showing his full face, with his eyes looking at the viewer and a calm or cheerful expression. But this picture is an extreme closeup of his face in profile, and he appears to be wincing. On a wall otherwise decorated with wanted posters, it communicates something less than unqualified admiration for President Johnson. If, as Roger implied in episode 26, the sheriff owes his office to the support of the Collins family, the picture would suggest that the Collinses were not LBJ fans.

I’ll also mention that Marc Masse’s entry for this episode on his Dark Shadows from the Beginning features one of his most outlandish accounts of a control room conversation between director Lela Swift and executive producer Dan Curtis. If you miss the sensibility of the 1970s National Lampoon, you’ll enjoy reading it.

Episode 25: A neat way of managing people

The episode revolves around a letter to Victoria from the Hammond Foundling Home. The letter reports that no one connected with the Home had ever heard of the Elizabeth Collins Stoddard or any of the other Collinses before the letter came offering Vicki the job as David’s governess. This letter has set Elizabeth into a panic, since it exposes as a lie her story that Roger was friends with someone connected to the Home and that that person had recommended her. It sets David into an even more extreme panic, since he is terrified that his father will send him away to some kind of institution where children are kept and the Hammond Foundling Home is such an institution.

In her panic, Elizabeth demands that Roger sit down with Vicki and corroborate her lie. Roger is worried that Burke, who has hired private investigators to look into Vicki’s background, will discover some piece of information that will damage the family, and wants Elizabeth to confide in him. He is insistent enough about this to raise the audience’s hopes that in some future episode, we will get answers about Vicki through dialogue between the two of them. For now, she shuts him down by threatening to throw him out of the house unless he obeys her.

When Roger does talk with Vicki, she reminds him that she had asked him if she knew anything about her or about the reason she was hired when they first met. He had said no, and in every way showed bafflement about how Elizabeth heard of her. He tries to explain that away by saying that he was distracted by worry about Burke, and tries to deflect further questions by saying that his contact is a donor who wishes to remain anonymous.

Vicki is obviously unconvinced. Alexandra Moltke Isles has strabismus, and in her closeups during the scene with Roger she turns this to her advantage. Her eyes seem to be moving independently of each other, a more polite expression than eye-rolling, but just as effective at communicating disbelief. Marc Masse captured the effect quite well in this still image, on his Dark Shadows from the Beginning:

Roger’s remark to Elizabeth in this line, that she has “a neat way of managing people,” applies equally well to Vicki in her scene with him. At the end of the conversation, she knows that he was lying, and he knows that she knows. She also knows that he is under his sister’s thumb, not a threat to her position no matter how uncomfortable he may find her presence on the staff, and he knows that she knows that.

David’s panic leads him to take a less devious path than does his aunt, but ultimately an even more disastrous one. He steals the letter from Vicki. His father catches him with it and returns it to her.

Vicki herself is less concerned with the letter than with a thought we saw take shape in the back of her mind at the end of episode 23. She asks David about the magazines on auto mechanics he likes to read, about how he learns to put things together and take them apart. David responds with a denial that he sabotaged his father’s car; Vicki calmly replies that she hadn’t accused him of that.

Vicki comes into the drawing room and tells Elizabeth that David has been acting strangely ever since his father’s car went off the road, that when the sheriff came he was overwhelmed with the thought that he would be arrested, etc. Elizabeth dismisses the topic brusquely, seeing no significance in it. Vicki persists in the topic, reminding her that the sheriff said they should try to think of someone other than Burke who might want to kill Roger. Elizabeth declares “There is no one else”; at that, Roger sashays into the room and declares “Except my loving son, of course.”

Elizabeth has even less patience with this remark from Roger than with whatever it is Vicki is saying, and moves along so that Roger can tell Vicki the lie she has ordained. In the course of that conversation, she again says that they don’t actually know that Burke was the saboteur, a point that is no more meaningful to Roger than it had been to his sister.

Afterward, she goes back to her room and finds that David has stolen the letter again. She goes to his room to look for it. She doesn’t find it. Instead, she finds the bleeder valve, evidence that her suspicions are correct.