Tag: portraits

We open in the front parlor of the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. Willie Loomis, the sorely bedraggled blood-thrall of newly resident vampire Barnabas Collins, is lighting candles.

A knock comes at the door. No one knows that Barnabas has brought Willie to the house. Before Barnabas bit him, he was dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, a menace to all and sundry. Almost everyone in the great house on the estate and many people in the nearby village of Collinsport have been feeling a great sense of relief for the last few days because they believe that Willie has gone and will never return. So he responds to the knocking by trying to hide.

Well-meaning governess Vicki comes in and calls for Barnabas. She finds Willie and demands to know what he is doing there. He tells her not to worry about that, but to get out of the house as quickly as she can.*

Willie tried to rape Vicki in #203, and crazed handyman Matthew Morgan held her prisoner in the Old House in episodes #116-126. So regular viewers will be absorbed in Alexandra Moltke Isles’ performance of Vicki’s refusal to be intimidated by this man in this space. At first she visibly steels herself to stand up to Willie. As he keeps his distance and evades her questions, she starts to suspect that he is more afraid of her than she is of him. She begins to relax, and takes stock of the improvements that have been made to the house. By the time she concludes that Willie is probably telling the truth about being Barnabas’ servant, she has an amused, almost triumphant look on her face and an easy sway to her movements. She talks easily and cheerfully about the improvements made since the last time she was in the house, and Willie squirms.

As Vicki tries to communicate reclusive matriarch Liz’ invitation for Barnabas to join the Collins family for dinner in the great house, Willie denies that he knows where Barnabas is or when he will come back, and continues to demand that Vicki leave. She finally gives up and goes, but with irritation, not fear. She leaves with a sarcastic “Thank you!”

After Vicki leaves, Barnabas appears and scolds Willie. First, he taunts Willie’s roughness (“My, you are a polite one!”) Then, he orders him not to try to protect anyone from him. He is stern, Willie is terrified, the whole effect is suitably sinister.

We cut to the Evans cottage, home of artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie rushes into the front door panting, as if she has been running. She shows intense fear when she hears a knock on the door. She calls out, “Who is it?” “Barnabas Collins,” comes the reply. “Mr Collins?” “That’s right.” She slowly opens the door, with the chain in place, and peeks out. She relaxes slightly when she sees that it really is the kindly eccentric she met the other night.

Barnabas asks permission to come in. Maggie opens the door and gestures towards the inside of the house. Barnabas asks again. Only after she explicitly invites him does he cross the threshold. There’s a tradition that vampires can enter only where they are invited, and the show has been following that strictly so far. Barnabas didn’t even go into Maggie’s restaurant until she asked him. Perhaps that was why he went there after it had closed, so that she would have to unlock the door and explicitly invite him to come in.

Maggie explains that she is unsettled because she felt someone followed her home. Considering that Barnabas knocked on her front door less than 30 seconds after she came in, I’d say her feeling has had some pretty solid corroboration, but she doesn’t seem to be making the connection. Maggie goes on to say that she is on edge anyway because some unseen man grabbed local woman Jane Ackerman by the throat the other day and vanished into the night when Jane was able to scream and attract a crowd.

Barnabas explains that he was intrigued when she mentioned that her father was an artist. Maggie brightens and ushers Barnabas towards Sam’s paintings. He looks at several and admires them.

Sam comes home. He is as disquieted as Maggie was when she entered. He tells her that he looked for her at the restaurant and was alarmed to see that she had already closed and was presumably walking home. There has been another attack.

The conversation shows how exotic Barnabas is in Collinsport. He speaks with a mid-Atlantic accent, uses old-fashioned grammatical constructions,** and his manners are a caricature of the Old World courtier. Sam is slangy and vulgar, telling Barnabas that the police “think it’s the same guy” behind both attacks. The contrast between the polished Barnabas and the coarse Sam will be developed further in this episode and later.

Barnabas asks Sam to paint his portrait. At the word “commission,” Sam stands up straight and becomes very still, while Maggie holds her breath. When Barnabas offers $1000 for the work, Maggie burst into grin, and Sam visibly struggles to keep from jumping with joy.***

As Sam, David Ford has a lot of trouble with his lines today. So much that Danny Horn, in his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, writes that “It’s unbelievable that this man was employed, even on this show.” But Ford plays Sam’s response to Barnabas’ offer perfectly, showing us a man who is excited by a lucrative opportunity, but who also remembers a time when he was in a position to negotiate when such offers came in, and who wishes his daughter could remember it as well. In spite of all Ford’s communings with the teleprompter, that moment reminded me of Marc Masse’s rave review of Ford’s first appearances on Dark Shadows and of his theory that Ford’s style of acting had a salutary influence on his cast-mates.

Barnabas wants to sit for Sam before the night is out. He insists that the painting be done at the Old House, and exclusively at night. Sam has little choice but to agree.

We know that Barnabas is unavailable during the day, but it is not immediately clear why the work should be done at the Old House. Barnabas seems to have plans for Maggie, and hanging around her house every night would seem a more efficient way to advance those than having her father come to his.

Perhaps he wants the portrait to have some kind of special relationship to the house. Portraits have been an important part of the show from the beginning. The main set is the foyer and drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, and the oversized portraits of Collins ancestors are among its most prominent visual features. In the early weeks, dashing action hero Burke Devlin commissioned Sam to paint his portrait, which for reasons too tedious to repeat sent high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins into a tizzy.

As the show moved deeper and deeper into uncanny themes, portraits became a bridge between the world of the living and the world of the more or less dead. When blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins was driving the action of the show, a supernatural force compelled Sam to paint portraits of her. And Willie freed Barnabas from his coffin because he became obsessed with the portrait of Barnabas in the foyer of the great house and Barnabas was able to call to him through it. So maybe a portrait painted in the much-haunted Old House will derive some kind of magical or demonic power from its place of origin.

Maggie, still radiant with joy at the promising new turn in her Pop’s career, drops him off at the Old House. He sets up an easel, puts a canvas on it, puts a chair where he wants Barnabas to sit, and starts to work right away. My wife, Mrs Acilius, is among other things a painter; when she saw this, she asked in puzzlement what happened to the sketch-making phase of the project. By the time the sun is about to rise and Barnabas disappears from the room, the figure is almost half completed. Comparing that with the weeks and weeks Sam spent dragging his feet in response to Roger’s demand he not paint Burke, and with his frustratingly repetitious role in the Laura storyline, this Bob Ross-like speed would seem to suggest that the show will be picking up its pace sometime soon. ****

Meanwhile, Maggie is visiting Vicki at the great house. In front of Barnabas’ portrait in the foyer, Vicki says that she likes Barnabas very much- after all the troubles the Collinses have had in the last several months, it’s a relief to have someone around who is friendly. This is almost exactly what flighty heiress Carolyn had said to Vicki when they were standing on the same spot in #214, and it accounts for Liz’ instantaneous delight upon meeting Barnabas in #211. It is his contrast with foes like Burke, Laura, Willie, and seagoing con man Jason McGuire that has smoothed Barnabas’ entry into the present-day Collins family, and he is sliding right into possession of the Old House, which is after all a huge mansion.

The episode ends with an inversion of its beginning. Instead of going into hiding, Willie emerges into view. Sam, who had a nasty run-in with Willie in #207, is as surprised and as unhappy to see him as Vicki had been. As Vicki had done, he accepts Willie’s claim to be Barnabas’ servant after he looks around the parlor and realizes that Barnabas must have had someone helping him put it to rights. As the action began with Vicki coming in through the doors of the Old House, so it ends with Sam going out through them. Vicki entered looking up and calling loudly “Mr Collins!” Sam exits looking down and muttering about the idea of resuming work at sundown. The contrast shows how the events of the episode, even those which seemed pleasant to the people experiencing them, have left everyone confused and helpless before Barnabas.*****

*When Willie delivers this line, actor John Karlen briefly assumes an accent reminiscent of his predecessor in the role, Mississippian James Hall. There’s a little bit of the South in some of his lines later in the episode as well, mostly when he says “Ah’m” instead of “I’m.” Karlen was from Brooklyn, and the day will come when Willie is from there as well. But today is not that day.

**He doesn’t use them correctly- twice he uses the objective case form “whom” when the context calls for the subjective “who.” Still, he uses them, that’s the point.

***For several months, ending 1 May 2023, PlutoTV had a channel that showed Dark Shadows 24/7. They had about 600 episodes, starting from #210 and ending somewhere in the 800s, which they run on a loop interspersed with some related material, such as Dan Curtis’ Dracula. Every week or two, I turned it on during odd moments of the day to see which one they were showing. Often as not, I found this episode. Twice in a row, I tuned in at the moment when Barnabas is telling Sam “You are definitely the man for me!” I turned it on in the middle of the afternoon on 18 April, the very day Mrs Acilius and I were going to watch this episode and I would start writing the post above, and there was Maggie telling Barnabas about the attack on Jane Ackerman. I turned away, since I knew we’d be watching it that evening.

Now, Pluto shows a block of episodes on their “Classic TV Dramas” channel in the afternoons. Late this morning I turned Pluto on to have sound in the background while doing some paperwork, found Rat Patrol on that channel, and at noon it gave way to… Dark Shadows, episode 222!

****Mrs Acilius points out that Sam painted Laura’s portraits just as quickly. That time, he was acting as the tool of the ghost of Josette Collins. Perhaps Barnabas can do what Josette did, and is acting through Sam.

She also remarks that what Sam has painted includes Barnabas’ face without his mouth. Considering that the subject is a vampire, it must be significant that the painter is delaying the depiction of that particular body part.

*****As Willie leads Sam out of the house, a bell tower chimes. A single rooster isn’t too hard to accept as a feature of the estate, but since when has Collinwood had a carillon?