Tag: matthew morgan

Episode 81: I’m not a gossip

We spend today, not so much with the ancient and esteemed Collins family, but with two of the three members of their household staff. Gruff caretaker Matthew Morgan goes into town so that he can scowl at the family’s nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Mrs Sarah Johnson goes to the great house of Collinwood to interview for the position of housekeeper.

During the interview, Mrs Johnson tells reclusive matriarch Liz that “I’m not a gossip.” This will become a frequent refrain of hers in the years to come, and will usually serve as a preface to remarks in which she will blab the entire contents of her mind to anyone who will listen. This time, “I’m not a gossip” is followed immediately by her assertion that in all her years as housekeeper to beloved local man Bill Malloy, she never repeated a word she heard spoken in his house to anyone. It seems to be news to Liz that Bill had ever spoken any words he would want to have kept in confidence. It’s certainly news to the audience. All we’ve heard up to this point was that Bill’s whole life was absorbed in his work. Mrs Johnson set me wondering what we might yet learn about Bill.

Matthew drives Mrs Johnson back to town. He sits down with her as she prepares to have lunch at the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. Matthew tries to persuade her she would be better off moving in with her daughter than taking a job at Collinwood. He tells her that Collinwood is in fact haunted, and that if she isn’t afraid of its ghosts she ought to be. She is unconvinced.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Matthew gets a great deal of emphasis in this episode. There are two location inserts featuring him- when he walks through downtown Collinsport to the Collinsport Inn, and when the taxi carrying Mrs Johnson pulls up to the outside of the house and we see him trimming bushes. Exterior footage is never commonplace in Dark Shadows, and when we see a character moving around outdoors it’s a sign of something important.

Matthew in town
Matthew sees the taxi

Unknown to Matthew or Liz, Mrs Johnson is in fact convinced that Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, is responsible for Bill’s death and that Liz is protecting him. She wants to become housekeeper at Collinwood so she can spy on the Collinses for Burke.

After Matthew leaves the restaurant, Mrs Johnson reports to Burke on her interview with Liz. He is dissatisfied with her work as a secret agent. He berates her, as we had seen him berate his henchmen in earlier episodes. They had submitted to his rantings meekly. Mrs Johnson snaps at him, and gets an apology. Evidently we are supposed to expect that she will be a strong character in her own right, not a mere cat’s paw for Burke.

This is the first of many episodes that survives only on kinescope. This has some happy effects. For example, the footage of Matthew walking in downtown Collinsport is preceded by a shot of him going out the front door of the great house. The kinescope’s poorer resolution makes this set look like very much like an outdoor shot itself.

CORRECTION: It turns out this isn’t a kinescope, just a particularly crummy videotape. There’s a kinescope coming up later this week, though.

Matthew leaves the house

Episode 64: Collinwood breeds murderers

Dashing action hero Burke Devlin goes to the local tavern, The Blue Whale. He sees Matthew Morgan, maniacally devoted servant of his foes, the wealthy Collins family. Matthew demands that Burke leave town. When Burke refuses, Matthew calmly informs Burke that he will kill him. Mitch Ryan plays Burke’s reaction to this announcement with a priceless look of disbelief. There’s a flicker of light in his eyes in the first second of the reaction, and he holds it long enough to be hilarious to watch:

Burke's reaction
Burke is stunned by Matthew’s casual announcement

Their conversation devolves into a bar fight. After the sheriff breaks it up, Ryan again has an opportunity for a memorable facial expression:

Burke recovering from the bar fight
Burke recovering from the bar fight

Burke has been obnoxious enough, and Thayer David’s Matthew is engaging enough, that we found ourselves cheering Matthew on and laughing when Burke lost the fight.

In the sheriff’s office, both men get stern scoldings, Matthew for assaulting Burke, Burke for interfering with the police investigation of the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy. The sheriff releases both, warning Burke to stay away from the estate of Collinwood and Matthew to stay on it. Alone in the office, he calls reclusive matriarch Liz to warn her that Burke might be coming to Collinwood, and asking her to call him if he does.

Liz tells first the sheriff, then her daughter, flighty heiress Carolyn, that she doesn’t think Burke will come to the estate. The sheriff had previously assured Matthew that Burke wouldn’t go there “if he knows what’s good for him.” If soap opera characters knew what was good for them, they wouldn’t get much screen time, so of course the episode ends with Burke entering the house.

Episode 13: Worst thing that ever happened to this house, him comin’ back

Vicki visits Matthew in his cottage, the first time we’ve seen that set. She hopes that he will tell him something about her past. He doesn’t, but he does go on about the Burke Devlin trial. After he has brought up the Devlin trial he asks her why she’s interested in it. She says she isn’t, he scowlingly demands she stop talking about it. She’s bewildered. That might have been meant to be a joke, but if so it doesn’t land- George Mitchell’s Matthew is just too intense, too tortured, for that kind of joke to work.

Vicki’s effort to befriend Matthew fails as completely as does her attempt to get information about her origins, but the cottage set goes a long way towards making it seem that it might succeed. We see Matthew cooking and sharing a meal with Vicki in an intimate setting, and for all his strange ferocity he is very talkative. When she answers a question of his with a lie that is sure to anger him violently if he discovers it, we are in high suspense, hoping against hope that she will not be found out.

The caretaker’s cottage isn’t the only set we see for the first time in this one. We also follow Vicki into the garage at Collinwood. She finds Burke there with a wrench in his hand, standing next to the open door of Roger’s car. Burke explains this odd situation by claiming that he had been thinking of buying a similar car and wanted to look Roger’s over. Vicki is suspicious, and says that Mr Collins wouldn’t like his being there. Burke asks her to keep it secret, an invitation she pointedly refuses to accept.

Unlike the caretaker’s cottage, which is a staple set of the series almost up to the very end, we only see the garage a few more times. That’s a shame, I think. The show is so much about the house that the stories would all be richer if they gave us more of a sense of the physical realities of the house and its functioning. Simply placing a scene in the garage, where people are handling tools and standing in front of machinery while they talk about whatever it is that’s going on in the story, can accomplish that without the need to dwell on anything technical or mundane.

Also, the garage is where cars are kept. A scene there can establish a connection with the outside world. Often the show intentionally builds a claustrophobic sense in the audience, but sometimes they simply have a long string of episodes set entirely in the house and get us feeling more confined than we have any need to do. In those periods, a scene set in the garage could let just enough air in to keep us from being distracted by the closeness of the quarters.

Episode 6: “Winters! Victoria Winters!”

Looking for David in the basement of Collinwood, Vicki encounters caretaker Matthew Morgan. No one has bothered to tell Matthew that a new person will be coming to the house, so he assumes she is a burglar and confronts her accordingly. Liz shows up, telling Matthew that Vicki belongs in the house and telling Vicki that she doesn’t belong in the basement.

In week one, Liz refused all requests for information about who Vicki was and why she hired her to be David’s governess. But at least she had told the other members of the household that Vicki would be coming. She hasn’t told even that to Matthew, notwithstanding the fact that, as she will explain to Vicki in this episode 13, Matthew is a “strange and violent man.” By taking the job and living in the house, Vicki, our point of view character, has made herself dependent on Liz; we the audience are also dependent on Liz, in that the stories in these first months all revolve around actions Liz will or won’t take. So it’s doubly unnerving that she is so very stingy with information.

George Mitchell, who plays Matthew here and in his next few appearances, is the sort of actor we often see in the first 42 weeks of the show. He is essentially a miniaturist, who builds a character one finely etched mannerism at a time. His successor in the role, Thayer David, worked at the opposite extreme, becoming the first exponent of the Dark Shadows house style of acting (often called “Go Back to Your Grave!” because of Lara Parker’s explanation of it.) Without that style, the show wouldn’t have become what it did in the period which people remember, so I can’t regret the recasting. But I do wish we could somehow see what it would have been like had George Mitchell carried the character through his whole arc of development. He could have played something I think Art Wallace could have written, a closely observed, sensitively explored psychological study.

There’s another what-might-have-been moment when Vicki tries to make friends with Matthew. He introduces himself to her with a gruff “Morgan! Matthew Morgan!” To which she replies, mimicking his down-east accent, “Wintahs! Victoria Wintahs!” It isn’t much of a joke, and Matthew isn’t amused. But it’s hard not to wonder what Vicki might have become if she’d been allowed to make the occasional joke as the series went on.