the jukebox at the Blue Whale – Page 2

Episode 207: Just fate

Today we’re in Collinsport’s night spot, The Blue Whale tavern. Seagoing con man Jason McGuire is at the bar, trying to convince his henchman, dangerously unstable Willie Loomis, to stop acting like he’s about to rape every woman he meets before they get thrown out of town.

A party comes in consisting of artist Sam Evans, Sam’s daughter Maggie, and Maggie’s boyfriend Joe. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin enters and joins Sam, Maggie, and Joe at their table. Burke has confronted Willie a couple of times, and Willie tells Jason that they are fated to have it out sooner or later. Jason tries to persuade him to abandon this idea, telling him that Burke would be a useful friend and a formidable enemy.

Jason delights Willie by telling him that Burke is an ex-convict. John Karlen brings such enormous joy to Willie’s reaction to this news that it lightens the whole atmosphere of the episode.

Jason buys Burke a drink and tells him that Willie is secretly a nice person. He and Burke find that they both have a high opinion of psychoanalysis, of all things, but their shared admiration of the Freudian school does not lead them to agree about Willie.

Sam goes to the bar, leaving Maggie and Joe to themselves. A bit later, Joe has to leave Maggie alone for a few minutes while he makes a telephone call to check in with a situation at work. He urges her to stay at the table and avoid Willie. She notices that Willie is talking to her father, and is alarmed. Joe tells her not to worry- from what they’ve seen, it appears that Willie only likes to hurt girls.

At first, Willie and Sam’s conversation is cheery enough. Willie is impressed with Sam’s beard, and even more impressed that Sam is a professional painter. For a moment, we catch a glimpse of Willie, not as an explosively violent felon, but as an awkward guy who is trying to make a friend. This passes when the idea of nude models pops into Willie’s head, and he asks again and again where Sam keeps the naked ladies. Sam tells Willie that he doesn’t use live models, at first politely, then with irritation. Willie responds with his usual vicious menace.

Maggie goes up to intercede. This would seem to be an odd choice. Jason is at the next table, and when Willie was harassing her and picking a fight with Joe last week she saw Jason rein Willie in. She knows that Jason is eager to smooth things over with the people Willie has already alienated, so it would be logical to appeal to him. Burke and Joe are nearby as well, and have both made it clear that they are ready to fight Willie. If either of them goes to Willie, he will be distracted and Sam will have a clear avenue of escape. And of course Bob the bartender really ought to have thrown Willie out of the tavern long ago. Maggie, on the other hand, will attract Willie’s leering attentions and complicate her father’s attempt to get away from Willie by making him feel he has to defend her.

From his first appearance in #5, Sam was a heavy-drinking sad-sack. Today, Sam seems to have become a social drinker. He’s gone out with friends for a couple of rounds, and is pleasant and calm the whole time. Soap operas are allowed to reinvent characters as often as they like. If Sam’s alcoholism isn’t story-productive anymore, they are free to forget about it.

The problem with this scene is that Maggie hasn’t forgotten. Maggie’s whole character is that of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic. It makes sense that an ACoA, seeing her father in trouble, would cast aside all rational calculations and rush up to protect him. But if Sam isn’t an alcoholic anymore, Maggie is just a very nice girl who laughs at inappropriate times.

Burke comes to Maggie and Sam’s rescue. Willie draws a knife on Burke, they circle, Burke disarms Willie and knocks him to the floor.

We’ve seen many couples move about on the floor of The Blue Whale while music was playing, and usually their movements have been so awkward and irregular that it is not clear that what they are doing ought to be called “dancing.” But Burke and Willie’s fight is a remarkably well-executed bit of choreography. At one point Willie brushes against the bar, and it wobbles, showing that it is a plywood construction that weighs about eight pounds. But it doesn’t wobble again, even though the fighters both make a lot of very dynamic movements within inches of it, and at the end of the fight Willie looks like he is being smashed into it.

Burke about to deliver the knockout blow. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

After the fight, Willie and Jason meet in a back alley, the first time we have seen that set. Jason assures Willie that he will eventually get his cut of the proceeds of Jason’s evil scheme, but tells him he will have to leave town right away. Willie vows to kill Burke.

The jukebox at The Blue Whale plays throughout the episode. In addition to Robert Cobert’s usual “Blue Whale” compositions, we hear Les and Larry Elgart’s versions of a couple of Beatles tunes and of a Glenn Miller number.

Episode 168: The uninvited

We see more of the exterior of the cottage on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood than we have before when dashing action hero Burke Devlin bangs on the door and demands that its current resident, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, let him in. Laura eventually gives in. Then, they sit around recapping previous episodes for about ten minutes.

Through the window, we see Laura by the fire

Not only is Laura reluctant to open the door to Burke, she also takes every opportunity to urge him to cool his enthusiasm for her. Most notably, when he tells her that he doesn’t like the way visiting psychologist Dr Guthrie is asking questions about her, Laura gives a plausible explanation for Guthrie’s behavior. Guthrie is trying to figure out why reclusive matriarch Liz fell into a catatonic state. He knows that the new thing in Liz’ life at the time of her attack was a conflict with Laura. Since Liz can’t talk, Laura says it’s reasonable that he’s asking other people about that conflict.

We saw Laura cast a spell that caused Liz’ condition, and we’ve seen her use her magical powers to influence others. But we’ve never seen her do any such thing concerning Burke. For all we know, his devotion to her might be entirely native to his psychology. Even if she is exercising control over him, that may be perfectly natural. Burke has strong feelings for Laura and she knows him well, so she may be able to manipulate him without resort to sorcery. So it is by no means clear what Laura wants Burke to do about Guthrie. Maybe she is tricking Burke into confronting Guthrie, or maybe she sincerely wants him to leave Guthrie alone.

As the next scene opens, Guthrie arrives at the local tavern, The Blue Whale. Guthrie sees drunken artist Sam Evans at the bar. He tells Sam that Burke called him and asked to meet him there. Burke isn’t there yet, but we hear the jukebox play a few measures of Les and Larry Elgart’s recording of “Brasil.” In #3, Burke sat in the tavern and told hardworking young fisherman Joe that he got rich because of something that happened in South America, and we heard several more references to Burke’s connections to that continent in the first couple of months of the show. So that bit of music might suggest to regular viewers that The Blue Whale is Burke’s territory, at least as far as Dr Guthrie is concerned.

Sam tells Guthrie the story of the fire in which he injured his hands. That’s odd- less than a week ago, in #164, Sam unburdened himself of all sorts of things in a conversation that began when Guthrie noticed evidence of that fire. It’s hard to believe he wouldn’t have told him what he tells him today, that he thinks Laura somehow started the fire and made him stick his hands in the flames even though she was far away.

Burke shows up and Guthrie follows him to a table. Burke puts on a menacing demeanor. Guthrie quickly turns the conversation into a therapy session, and Burke falls into the role of hostile patient. Guthrie does leave the tavern when Burke dismisses him, so it remains Burke’s territory, but Burke looks like a fool. He looks even sillier when he goes to Sam and starts giving orders, none of which Sam shows the slightest inclination to follow. If Laura did want Burke to stay off the front lines of her conflict with Guthrie and the rest, perhaps it is because she knew that his efforts would end up like this.

Guthrie goes to Laura’s cottage and invites her to participate in a séance he is organizing. She declines. He tells her he wants to contact the ghost of Josette Collins. We know that Laura and Josette are adversaries, so her reaction to this is interesting to watch. It is possible that Guthrie tells her about it because he wants to test her reaction. She is startled, becomes nervous, and turns away from him, while he watches her intently.

Laura absorbing the news that Guthrie is trying to contact Josette

Episode 166: The most harmful thing of all

Every episode of Dark Shadows begins with a voiceover narration. This is how today’s goes:

My name is Victoria Winters. The brightness of the morning cannot mask the fact that the night has been marked by a restless, fitful sleep, especially for one young woman who has been disturbed by strange premonitions and events that she does not fully understand.

We then see the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood, where two young women are both showing signs of disturbance. There’s no way of telling which one the narration is referring to. Flighty heiress Carolyn is pacing and talking, while well-meaning governess Vicki is clenched tight playing solitaire. This sloppy mismatch is the first sign that we’re dealing with a script by Malcolm Marmorstein, the worst writer on Dark Shadows.

Disturbed by strange premonitions and events

Vicki and Carolyn are worried about strange and troubled boy David. David has spent the night with his mother, blonde fire witch Laura, and is not back yet. They are convinced that Laura is dangerous, but cannot be sure how or to whom. Marmorstein’s awkward dialogue stumbles up to a climax in which Vicki tells Carolyn that visiting parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie had said he was inclined to organize a séance. Considering that he first discussed that idea in a conversation with the two of them yesterday, Vicki’s announcement of this as news and Carolyn’s incredulous reaction will leave returning viewers mystified.

David comes home. He’s fine. He tells Vicki that he sensed the presence of the ghost of Josette Collins watching over him in his mother’s cottage, and that he knows he is safe wherever Josette is. What the audience knows, but neither Vicki nor David does, is that Laura and Josette had a confrontation while he was sleeping, and that Josette retreated. Josette is not strong enough to defeat Laura by herself. When David goes to sit by the fire and stare at it in a trance-like state, as his mother habitually does, we wonder how Vicki and the others will put together a strong enough force to help Josette save David. That’s a suspenseful sequence, effectively realized.

Hardworking young fisherman Joe comes to the house on a business matter. He and Carolyn have a conversation about their defunct romance. Carolyn says that she has matured since those days, and that she is free to give it another try. Joe says he is not free. For a show with so many ghosts and ghoulies, it’s surprising that Dark Shadows inspires the greatest fear in its fans when they threaten to bore us yet again with a tedious dead-end storyline like the Carolyn/ Joe relationship. It’s certainly a relief when Joe is so firm as to leave no doubt that we’re finally done with that.

Joe has transferred his affections to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. We dissolve to an extreme closeup of the laughing mouth of Maggie’s father, drunken artist Sam Evans. Sam is in the local tavern, The Blue Whale, with a drink in his hand, a crony on either side of him, and some music we haven’t heard before on the jukebox.

Maggie and Joe are at a table, where he is trying to make her jealous by telling her of Carolyn’s interest in him, and she can’t stop watching her father and fretting about his drinking. The two of them talk a bit about how Sam’s drinking has reversed the roles of parent and child. That’s the big theme of Maggie in the first 42 weeks of the show, that she is an Adult Child of an Alcoholic. It’s because she’s had to cope with Sam’s addiction that Maggie is so nice to everyone, and also because of it that she has a habit of starting her lines with a little laugh that doesn’t always make sense in context. As the show goes on, Sam drinks a lot less and Maggie gets involved in a wider variety of stories, but that weird little laugh, the union card of many an ACoA, stays with the character to the end of her time on the the series.

Maggie leaves Joe alone at the table while she confronts Sam. She doesn’t stop him drinking, but she does manage to wreck the good mood he and his buddies had going. In the course of their talk, they recap the conversation Sam had with Dr Guthrie Thursday.

Dashing action hero Burke Devlin comes in and sits down with Joe while Maggie is scolding Sam. The two of them have been at odds over Carolyn, and now discover that neither of them is interested in her any longer. Joe seems irritated that his list of reasons to dislike Burke has grown shorter.

When Maggie returns to the table, Burke exchanges a few friendly words with her. He then goes to the bar to buy Sam a drink. Maggie voices her dismay at this plan, and even Bob the bartender gives a dark look at the idea of serving Sam yet more booze. But Burke ignores them both.

Burke wants to know about the conversation Sam had with Dr Guthrie. They recap the conversation Sam had with Maggie a few minutes before. Burke is in love with Laura, and may be under her influence. This conversation raises the prospect that Burke will be an ally of Laura’s against Vicki and her team. Its similarity to the conversation Maggie and Sam had so shortly before suggests that the Evanses may also make themselves more useful to Laura than to the good guys. The repetition grates hard enough on the audience that it is an inefficient way of making that point, but the point itself does add to the suspense.

Most episodes of Dark Shadows have only five credited actors and no extras. This one has seven credited actors and a bunch of extras, including featured background player Bob O’Connell as the bartender. There have been several episodes the last couple of weeks with only four actors; apparently they’ve been saving up to splurge on this one. It is by no means the dullest installment of this period of the show, but neither are there any of the thrills or major story developments you would expect from a high-budget episode. Frankly, it’s rather worrying that this is what they lay out the big bucks for now. Is this as exciting as the show is going to get?

Episode 156: Why is my baby crying?

At the end of Friday’s episode, we saw reclusive matriarch Liz start to fall down the stairs, then saw her sprawled on the floor below. Today begins with a recreation of that scene, but instead of merely starting to fall, actress Joan Bennett tumbles far enough forward that she must really have gone down. It’s an impressive stunt.

Dark Shadows first stunt performer: Joan Bennett

Most of the episode is taken up with Liz’ demented condition and the reactions of the members of the household to it. The audience knows that Liz’ troubles are the result of a spell cast on her by blonde fire witch Laura. At moments Liz is almost able to figure that out herself, but no one else has a clue what is going on. The whole episode is full of standout moments for Liz. If there had been Daytime Emmy Awards in 1967, this would have been the episode Dan Curtis Productions would have sent to the voters to get Joan Bennett her Best Actress award.

At one point, Liz begins to recover her memory and is about to take action against Laura. Before she can reach anyone, a ghostly figure appears in her room. Afterward, she has a mad scene, indicating that she has been rendered powerless.

The ghostly sighting raises some questions about Laura. Is it Laura’s ghost she sees? Or another ghost allied with Laura? Or has her abuse of Liz’ brain led it to produce this hallucination on its own? The show is very indefinite about what exactly Laura is and how she operates, giving us the chance to have a lot of fun speculating about her.

This episode is replete with notable firsts. In addition to the first real stunt of the series, it features the first scene in which Bob O’Connell, as the bartender in The Blue Whale, has lines to deliver.

In that same scene at The Blue Whale, we hear music coming out of the jukebox that we haven’t heard before. It is a medley of Lennon-McCartney tunes rendered in “smooth jazz” style by Bud Shank.

It’s also the first time a conversation on the landing at the top of the stairs leading up from the foyer is photographed straight-on. Several times, we had seen characters talking to each other up there, but always before the camera had been angled up from the floor below. That had created the sense that the conversation was removed from the main course of the action. Today, it’s just another part of the set.

It is the first time we see Liz’ room. Two notable firsts take place there. A favorite prop of Dark Shadows fandom, the so-called “Ralston-Purina lamp,”* has been seen several times in the Collinsport Inn. In Liz’ room today, it makes the first of many appearances in the great house of Collinwood.

The ghostly figure in Liz’ room is played by Susan Sullivan, who has been acting in primetime on network television more or less continuously for the last 55 years. During the other hours, she writes plays and performs in Dark Shadows audio dramas.

A play she wrote under the title “What Friends Do” was produced by Smartphone Theater and posted on Youtube. The cast is made up of Dark Shadows alums Susan Sullivan, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Mitch Ryan, and David Selby. It’s about four friends in a retirement community during the Covid pandemic, and it’s terrific. The Q & A after includes a lot of stuff that Dark Shadows fans will find irresistible, including a little bit about today’s episode.

The voice that says “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production” at the end of the closing credits does not sound like ABC staff announcer Bob Lloyd. It’s higher-pitched and faster than his delivery, and the vowels are flatter than he articulates them. Perhaps it’s a tape fault distorting Lloyd’s voice, or perhaps he had a cold that day. If it was someone else, it’s another first. The Dark Shadows wiki doesn’t say anything about it, so I assume the surviving records and the published books that use them don’t say it was someone else.

*So-called because its red-and-white checked pattern looks like the logo of the Ralston-Purina animal food company.

Episode 78: Such fascinating company

High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins talks on the phone with his sometime partner in crime, drunken artist Sam Evans. They agree to meet in Collinsport’s tavern, The Blue Whale. After Roger gets off the phone, well-meaning governess Vicki passes by. He invites her to come with him to the tavern. Up to this point Roger has often been quite unpleasant to Vicki and she has been wary of him. Also, he is a married man, and she has reason to suspect that he is her uncle. On the other hand, he is no longer a suspect in an active homicide investigation, and she hasn’t had a date in months. So she accepts.

Roger caressing Vicki. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Vicki putting her face on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Most of the episode takes place in the Blue Whale. Sam is there with his daughter, Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Hardworking young fisherman Joe joins them, and they invent a drinking game. Every time someone mentions the name “Collins,” the table must drink a toast to “Collins of Collinsport!” Getting into a situation where you have to take a drink every time Sam wants one isn’t a particularly prudent thing to do, but Maggie and Joe are in a daring mood.

Maggie has clearly set her cap for Joe. She gives him a frankly aggressive look that is startling to see in the face of The Nicest Girl in Town. Startling, but most welcome- Joe is still trapped in a useless storyline where he is boyfriend to flighty heiress Carolyn. But when we see him having a good time with Maggie, we can finally see the light at the end of that tunnel.

Girl knows what she wants. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Roger and Vicki show up. Roger and Sam go off and talk about something or other having to do with their dark doings. This conversation is meaningful only to the two of them. At this point, even the sheriff has lost interest in Roger and Sam’s little conspiracy. The actors are fun to watch- Louis Edmonds and David Ford always enjoyed playing off each other- but the audience certainly can’t be expected to keep track of whatever they’re talking about.

Vicki joins Maggie and Joe for some pleasant chatter about a couple of plot points the audience might want to keep in mind. Roger, frustrated by his talk with Sam, comes to the young people’s table and insults them. Joe, though he is an employee of the Collins family business, offers to fight Roger in defense of Maggie’s honor. Vicki and Sam break the fight up before Joe can throw his first punch. Roger announces that he has a headache and takes Vicki home.

Once there, Vicki thanks Roger for the evening, with no apparent sarcasm in her voice. He apologizes, and promises to take her out again. She sounds genuinely excited by the idea of another such outing. Who knows, next time maybe she will get something to eat, or a drink, or more than three minutes of conversation before she has to stop a fistfight and go home.

If Roger really is Vicki’s uncle- that is, if his sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, is secretly Vicki’s mother, as the show has been hinting pretty heavily- then a romance between Vicki and Roger would seem to be a soap opera cliche. Liz has struggled to keep Vicki from finding out anything about her origins. If Liz sees Vicki about to enter into an incestuous marriage, she might feel forced to stand up at the wedding when the minister asks if anyone present knows why these two may not be joined in lawful matrimony and to expose the secret.

The jukebox at the Blue Whale plays some music we haven’t heard before. The Dark Shadows wiki identifies it as a series of tracks from Les and Larry Elgart’s album “The New Elgart Touch.” It’s a step down from the tracks by Robert Cobert the jukebox has played so far, but it is a fitting accompaniment to the dancing of this guy. In most places he would be thought awkward, but by the standards of Collinsport he is indistinguishable from Fred Astaire: