Tag: michael currie

Preemption Day: Dark Shadows actors on N.Y.P.D. (1967-1969)

On 23 October 1970, the ABC network preempted its afternoon lineup to cover President Richard Nixon’s address to the General Assembly of the United Nations. As a result no episode of Dark Shadows premiered 56 years ago today.

A few months ago, I was looking for something to watch on TV. My eye fell on a show from the 1960s I’d never heard of, titled NYPD. I flipped over to it, expecting it would hold my attention for a few seconds at most. But I saw that the guest star was John Karlen, Willie Loomis himself, playing a television reporter. Like Willie, Karlen’s character thought he had found a path to fortune and success, only to end up hopelessly entangled with a homicidal maniac. Karlen was great of course, and the show was way above average for cop shows of any period. Also, the opening title sequence, shot from a perspective immediately behind a flashing light on top of a car speeding through the city streets, was obviously the inspiration for the same image in the opening of Police Squad! So I watched it again the next time it was on, and soon found myself watching it as a matter of habit.

NYPD was produced in New York City for ABC from 1967 to 1969, and Karlen was one of a great many Dark Shadows cast members who had parts on it. Their appearances are fun for Dark Shadows fans, and in more than a few cases, they played remarkably similar roles. There were other connections between the shows as well- Ohrbach’s even provided the wardrobe.

Here are some of the casting overlaps. The first season was 26 episodes long, the second 23:

Season 1, Episode 1, “Shakedown”: Opens in a hotel room where a man appears to have committed suicide. The hotel manager is played by Conrad Bain; as when he played Mr Wells, manager of the Collinsport Inn, we don’t get to see nearly enough of him. The hotel detective is played by Dana Elcar, Sheriff Patterson #1. The heroes from the 27th Squad of the New York Police Department are exasperated at having to deal with Elcar’s character, since he is notorious throughout the city as an utterly incompetent investigator. Good to see that he didn’t lose his Collinsport ways when he moved to the big city! And John Harkins, who appeared in four roles on Dark Shadows, always as a mysterious man from another place, plays a nameless character who is the secret leader of all the gays in NYC (I don’t know if the gays all share a secret leader now. Maybe things were different in the sixties.)

Season 1, Episode 2, “Fingerman”: Joel Fabiani was heard but not seen as Paul Stoddard in #271, when we flashed back to the night when Liz learned Paul’s secret and tried to beat him to death. In this episode, Fabiani plays a man who is frantic because his secrets have caught up with him and now someone wants to beat him to death.

Season 1,Episode 8, “To Catch a Hero”: Michael Currie was Dark Shadows first law enforcement officer, the hapless Constable Jonas Carter. In this episode, Currie plays an army officer assigned to assist the detectives with the case of a psychotic war veteran. He fails to provide appropriate security to keep the veteran from getting loose and the police are forced to shoot him. That’s exactly the result we’d expect if Constable Carter were in his position.

Season 1, Episode 9, “Murder for Infinity”: John Karlen’s episode. Other familiar faces in the cast are Ralph Waite, the future Pa Walton, as the homicidal maniac and Sam Waterston as a beatnik who uses “hetero” as a pejorative term to describe Karlen’s character. There’s no word on whether the Sam Waterston character is satisfied with John Harkins’ secret leadership, but I do wish the young Sam Waterston had been on Dark Shadows as a militant sexual liberationist who sneered at straight people.

Season 1, Episode 10, “The Pink Gumdrop”: Nancy Barrett is glimpsed for about three seconds sitting at a table in a cafe where people plan car thefts.

Season 1, Episode 11, “The Witness”: about 20 minutes into it there was Bob O’Connell, a.k.a. Bob the Bartender, as laboratory technician Gerardi. He has several lines, but is uncredited. He isn’t even listed on IMDb, so I took this screenshot to prove that it is him:

Criminalist Gerardi is supposed to analyze the ink on a document and determine when it was signed.

Season 1, Episode 12, “Boy Witness”: A 13 year old sees a woman shot to death and claims to have seen the gunman. A fingerprint on the cartridge of the fatal bullet leads the detectives to a man who matches the boy’s description and who was dating the woman. The man is played by Mitch Ryan. Ryan’s character breaks into the boy’s bedroom, and when the police catch up to him he assaults them and attempts suicide. It turns out the boy didn’t really get such a good look at the guy, so the detectives say that now they have to start all over. Since they could prove that he loaded the murder weapon, that would seem to be an overreaction! That overreaction reminds me of Burke Devlin’s belief that he was somehow proved innocent of vehicular manslaughter because he wasn’t driving his car when it hit the victim, he was just passed out drunk in the back seat after he had given the keys to an equally drunk guy. Still guilty!

Season 1, Episode 16, “Cruise to Oblivion”: Hugh Franklin played Richard Garner, grey eminence of the Collins’ family’s legal team on Dark Shadows. In this one, he plays the grey eminence of a drug ring. James Hall was Willie Loomis #1, a young mariner who seems to have lost his sea papers and who is a subordinate in some kind of unsavory scheme. Here, Hall is a subordinate in the scheme Franklin’s character oversees, and is connected with a ship carrying heroin.

Season 1, Episode 20, “Cry Brute”: Clarice Blackburn played three characters on Dark Shadows whose function was to introduce false allegations. Housekeeper Mrs Johnson was originally supposed to accuse Roger Collins of killing Bill Malloy; repressed spinster Abigail Collins brought in the Rev’d Mr Trask to accuse well-meaning governess Victoria Winters of witchcraft; and hateful biddy Minerva Trask accused neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond of all sorts of things. In this episode, Blackburn plays a wife who backs her husband up when he falsely accuses one of Our Heroes of assault.

Season 1, Episode 24, “The Private Eye Puzzle”: Donna McKechnie as a young woman with a secret, over a year before she appeared on Dark Shadows as Amanda Harris.

Season 1, Episodes 25 & 26, “Nothing is Real But the Dead” Parts One and Two: Michael Hadge, who attained immortality as motorcycle enthusiast Buzz on Dark Shadows, plays a man the detectives meet in a pool hall. In Part One, he’s on camera for about a minute, enough to make a strong impression. He complains angrily about the damn dirty hippies who have moved into the neighborhood and are ruining it for all the hardworking, clean-living old-time residents such as himself and his family.

In Part Two, he gets another minute. The detectives remember his vociferousness against the hippies, and suspects he may have killed one of them. He denies it. Hadge has a very fine needle to thread here. The character is pretending not to be afraid of the police, and he is not as good an actor as Hadge is. We notice his insincerity, and are left wondering if he might be guilty. But it takes more time than Hadge has to really deliver on this, so we wind up attributing the character’s shrill awkwardness to his limitations and bumping ourselves out of the story for a little bit.

Season 2, Episode 1, “Naked in the Streets”: Vince O’Brien played a couple of forgettable roles as senior law enforcement officers on Dark Shadows. He has an equally forgettable role in this one as the New York Police Department’s Commander for the borough of Manhattan.

Season 2, Episode 2, “Encounter on a Rooftop”: Alfred Hinckley had a bit part in the first episode of Dark Shadows as a train conductor, and a more substantial part later as a doctor who is initially courageous when confronted by the monsters, but who ends up letting them have their way. He has a small part in this one as a man who reports a prowler and sets off the action.

Season 2, Episode 5, “Deadly Circle of Violence”: Gene Lindsey has a great scene as a man who catches up to a racist mass murderer played by some guy called Al Pacino. He doesn’t share any scenes with the murderer’s girlfriend, played by a actress named Jill Clayburgh. I wonder if those two ever called Lindsey for career help when he made it big as Randall Drew in the 1840 segment of Dark Shadows.

Season 2, Episode 6, “Case of the Shady Lady”: Harvey Keitel danced at the Blue Whale in #33; within two years, he played the manager of a dance club in NYC in this episode.

Season 2, Episode 7, “The Golden Fleece”: John Harkins has a major part as a man who gives the police an incomplete report of a a robbery of which he was the victim. Erica Fitz is credited as a waitress, but we didn’t notice her.

Season 2, Episode 9, “Walk the Long Pier”: Hugh Franklin reprises his role as the drug kingpin, but doesn’t have much to say. Dolph Sweet, a forceful Collins family loyalist in #99, is a forceful police official. Frederic Forrest, who danced at the Blue Whale in #137, appears briefly and is credited as “Customs Official.”

Season 2, Episode 12, “The Love Hustle”: The episode opens with Lara Parker walking into the squad room, raving that her mother is in danger, and dropping dead. Most of the time she is on screen she is photographed in an extreme closeup focused on her eyes. She’s only on for a minute, but the rest of the episode is an investigation of what happened to her, so she makes an impression.

Season 2, Episode 13, “The Body in the Trunk”: Mitch Ryan is the angry father of a girl who died under unsavory circumstances. House Jameson, who appeared in #270 as the useless Judge Crathorne in #270 and #271, here plays the even more useless doctor who is responsible for the girl’s death.

Season 2, Episode 14, “Night Watch”: Daniel Keyes plays a locksmith, which I suppose might be a joke about his name. Come to think of it, as the Caretaker at the old cemetery north of town he played a character whose chief responsibility was locking and unlocking gates and doorways, so perhaps he was cast on Dark Shadows for the same reason.

Season 2, Episode 15, “Three Fifty Two”: Frederic Forrest, wearing a wig that appears to be made of an old truck tire, is the second most prominent member of a gang of robbers who beat up two of the three main characters.

Season 2, Episode 21, “Boys’ Night Out”: David Ford, Sam Evans #2 and Andre DuPrés, is a detective who advises Our Heroes on his specialty, extortion rackets. He just sits across a table from them and gives a brief lecture in a reassuring tone. He appears to be reading off a teleprompter.

Season 2, Episode 22, “Everybody Loved Him”: Alfred Hinckley has another small part as a witness.

Season 2, Episode 23, “No Day-Trippers Need Apply”: Lee Beery and Gaye Edmond play women who are more or less prostitutes, which their characters on Dark Shadows were not. Philip R. Allen plays a policeman, which his was.

Episode 24: Have you ever sat on a wrench?

The entire episode is set in the Collinsport Inn- the lobby, the restaurant, and Burke’s room.

In episode 21, Vicki took Liz in hand as if she were Plato’s Socrates and Liz were some pompous Athenian aristocrat, leading her through a series of simple, seemingly innocent questions to a most uncomfortable conclusion. That took place in the drawing room at Collinwood, while Carolyn watched. In episode 24, Carolyn joins Burke and the sheriff in Burke’s room. It’s Burke’s turn to play Socrates, Carolyn’s to answer the questions, and the sheriff’s to be an audience. Burke’s questioning is not only effective at raising doubts in the sheriff’s mind, but also prompts regular viewers to bracket Vicki and Burke together and see them as a likely, indeed inevitable, romantic pair.

The scenes in Burke’s room also highlight Roger’s bizarre folly in telling Burke his evidence against him before going to the police. We saw Vicki try to talk Roger out of this in two episodes, and the sheriff commented on it later. Watching the well-prepared Burke cross-examine Carolyn as effectively as any defense attorney, it is all the clearer that Roger’s behavior was driven not by any rational calculation, but by some wild impulse he cannot entirely control.

The scenes in the lobby and the restaurant show us a quiet rewriting of some characterizations laid out in episode 1. In that episode, Burke stood in the lobby and refused to admit that he so much as knew the name of Mr Wells, the hotel clerk, simply because Wells was from the town from which he was sent to prison ten years before. Now he stands on the same set, warmly greets one of the policemen who made the case against him, and repeatedly tries to persuade him to join him for lunch. Also in episode 1, Maggie stood behind the counter of the restaurant and told Vicki that she considers her, as a member of the staff of Collinwood, to be a “jerk” practically as bad as the family that owns the house. In this one, Carolyn herself comes into the restaurant and she and Maggie have a warm, cozy chat, like old friends.

I suppose it was inevitable that they would retcon Burke into a hail-fellow-well-met and Maggie into a friend of at least some of the Collinses. After all, soap operas consist mostly of conversation, so characters who aren’t on speaking terms with each other are dead weight. Placing these scenes on the same sets used in episode 1 is an emphatic way to make it clear to viewers who remember that episode that the change is intentional and permanent.

The videography is also as ambitious as we ever see it in this show. The camera tracks fluidly through the lobby, showing us more of that set than we see in any other episode, ending in a low angle shot of the sheriff that makes him look ominous. Some of those tracking shots are too much for Michael Currie, the actor playing the sheriff- during his scene alone with Burke, he bumps into one camera, stumbles into a piece of furniture, and then the other camera hits him in the back of the head. After that, he stands with his back to Burke and his elbows bent in front of him, looking for all the world like he is urinating on the floor:

Currie is so physically awkward that when Burke asks the sheriff the rhetorical question “Have you ever sat on a wrench?,” it seems to be a pretty near certainty that the answer is yes.

Currie has a rough time in this episode with his lines as well as with his movement. Perhaps the single funniest blooper comes when he declares that a good memory “is what I’m paid for,” then forgets his next line. It’s also interesting when he calls Burke “Burt.” Bloopers are after all one of the things Dark Shadows is known for, so we can’t be too annoyed with him for those. Worse is what happens when he does remember his lines. He intones them all as if he were leading the Pledge of Allegiance.

In the months after Mark Allen left the show, the standard of acting on it was remarkably high. Every actor other than Currie consistently turns in performances so strong that watching an episode feels like a fine evening at the theater. And bad as he is, even Currie doesn’t keep his scene partners from delivering good performances. He just wasn’t ready for professional acting. So I don’t have the same need to complain about him as about Allen, but he does deliver the series’ first laugh-out-loud moments of incompetence, and it is a relief when he is replaced.