watergate – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 273: Why is there nothing there?

For sixteen weeks, starting with the introduction of seagoing con man Jason McGuire in #193 and ending today, Dark Shadows has subjected its viewers to a storyline about Jason blackmailing reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Thirteen times in those sixteen weeks, we saw iterations of the same dreary scene- Jason makes a demand of Liz, Liz resists, he threatens to expose her terrible secret, she capitulates.

Now, Liz has exposed her own terrible secret. She has told everyone that eighteen years ago, she killed her husband Paul Stoddard and Jason buried Stoddard in the basement of the great house of Collinwood. Jason denied that Stoddard’s body could be found there, and as we open Sheriff Patterson and Fake Shemp Burke Devlin are digging up the basement to see who is right.

Liz and her brother Roger are in the drawing room. He asks why she didn’t confide her terrible secret in him. She says that perhaps she was too proud of her role as his older sister and the family’s moral compass. He admits that, if had told him the secret, he probably would have used it to blackmail her himself. This startling admission tells us just how completely isolated Liz is.

It tells regular viewers more than that. When Dark Shadows began, Roger was a deep-dyed villain. He hasn’t been directly connected to an ongoing storyline since his estranged wife, Laura Murdoch Collins, vanished in #191, and in the months since has figured as an immature, ineffectual person, a bratty little brother dependent on Liz’ money and unable to help her against Jason. With this admission he harks back to his first incarnation, and makes us wonder if we will see another side of him. If he has the strength to admit his villainy, perhaps he has the strength to change.

Meanwhile, Burke and the sheriff have turned up a trunk in the floor of the basement. It is empty and clean. There is no sign that there ever was a body in it.

Liz sees the empty trunk. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will think of Laura. Laura had died in Phoenix, Arizona shortly before showing up in Collinsport. After the apparently alive Laura had been in Collinsport for some time, her corpse mysteriously vanished from the morgue back in Maricopa County. Upon inspection, the graves of several of her ancestors turned out to be empty and clean. The Laura arc swallowed up most of the non-paranormal story elements left over from Dark Shadows’ early days as a Gothic romance tinged with the suggestion of a noir crime drama, and the blackmail plot is meant to sweep the last of them away and get the show on track as a supernatural thriller/ horror story. So we might think that the empty trunk is a sign that there was something not of this world about Stoddard.

They retreat from that intriguing possibility, as yesterday they retreated from the evidence they had already given us that a ghost haunted the place of Stoddard’s supposed burial. Jason admits to Liz that he and Stoddard cooked up a scheme where Stoddard would pretend to be dead so that he and Jason could help themselves to a big chunk of her wealth, then go away to live the high life. Jason says that he saw Stoddard in Hong Kong a bit over ten years ago, and that so far as he knows he is still alive and well.

Liz doesn’t want to press charges against Jason- she simply wants him to go away. Roger demands that Jason be charged with blackmail. In front of the sheriff, Roger announces that he is outraged at the money Jason took from Liz, including “business money.” This might make us wonder about Liz’ own criminal exposure. In #242, Roger told Liz that the company’s accounts were out of balance. We knew it was because she was slipping money to Jason, and they made a big enough point of her meeting with the accountants and telling them lies so that they would fix the books that for a moment it seemed like they were getting ready for a story about her getting in trouble for falsifying business documents.

That was dropped right away, and it doesn’t seem likely that Liz will be charged for paying hush money to Jason. Not many people in the USA in 1967 had any understanding of the crime of obstruction of justice. It wasn’t until the Senate Committee investigating the Watergate affair broadcast its hearings live in 1973 that the average viewer of daytime television would learn that giving a person money to stay away from the police is a felony. Before then, even many trained lawyers, among them several of the Watergate defendants, did not grasp this. So we can be confident that such matters would not enter Soap Opera Law in the 1960s.

The blackmail arc was dredged up from Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows, called Shadows on the Wall. The first time Wallace told the story was in a 1954 installment of an anthology TV series called The Web; that segment was titled “The House,” and he had to pad it a bit to fill out a 30 minute time slot. In 1957, Wallace stretched “The House” to even greater length, into an hour-long entry in another dramatic anthology, Goodyear Playhouse. Wallace left Dark Shadows in October 1966, but the series has been hanging from the old rope he sold Dan Curtis for four full months now. Jason will still be on the show for a couple more days, but we’ve finally seen the last of this drab tale.

Episode 172: The sound of fire

Friday, Dark Shadows showed us its first séance. Yesterday, the people who attended that séance tried to figure out what it meant. Today, word of the séance starts to get out to people who weren’t there.

These three episodes also involve wrapping up a lot of loose ends that only people who watched the show from the beginning will remember. Friday’s episode harked back to the ghostly image we saw in #30. Yesterday’s episode drew a line under the alarmingly inappropriate crush flighty heiress Carolyn had on her Uncle Roger in the first few weeks of the show. Today, dashing action hero Burke Devlin shows that he is still laboring under a misunderstanding that led him to a dead end in #89 and #99.

In those episodes, Burke was trying to take his revenge on the ancient and esteemed Collins family by hiring the most valued employees away from their cannery. He was confident he would succeed in this plan because he had more money than the Collinses. In #89, he explained that confidence to his lawyer with a bunch of cliches rich guys use when they are villains in old movies: “Money talks. Money buys loyalty. Everyone has their price. Name it and you can buy them. Some just come a little higher than others, that’s all, but everyone is for sale.”

Those men all rebuffed Burke’s offer, as hardworking young fisherman Joe had refused Burke’s attempt to buy his loyalty in #3. Burke believes that the Collinses’ power comes from their money. His failures suggest that it is more nearly the other way around. The Collinses dominate the town of Collinsport because the population is so much in the habit of deferring to them that they can’t really imagine any other way of life. Simply by living in town, they have been indoctrinated into an ideology that puts the Collinses at the center of everything. Though from the perspective of the outside world Burke may have come back to town as a representative of high finance and large-scale capitalism, in the eyes of the locals he might as well be trying to start a communist revolution.

The one Collinsport resident who has agreed to take Burke’s money as payment for working against the Collinses is Mrs Johnson. For many years, Mrs Johnson had been the faithful housekeeper to cannery manager Bill Malloy. In her first appearances, Mrs Johnson talked of her unrequited love for Bill and her conviction that the Collinses were responsible for his death. Wanting revenge on them, she agreed to Burke’s plan to take a job as housekeeper at Collinwood and to give him whatever information she could gather. He has been paying her ever since.

Today, Mrs Johnson comes to Burke’s room and announces she has some information she would give him even if he weren’t paying her. This remark will strike regular viewers as absurd. Those who remember Mrs Johnson’s early appearances know that her motivation for joining with Burke was not his money, but her drive for vengeance. Those who have seen her since, including earlier in this episode, know that she always tells everyone she meets everything she knows. Her usual conversational gambit is to declare “I mind my own business, and expect others to do the same!” and then divulge the entire contents of her awareness, including everything she learned by her incessant eavesdropping on everyone in the house.

In Mrs Johnson’s case, Burke is overlooking not only the power of ideology, but also the persistence of personal habits. Mrs Johnson not only does not need to be paid to give information; no amount of money could keep her from giving information. She can’t be incentivized out of telling too much, because she doesn’t know that she is doing it. She is perfectly sincere when she says “I mind my business!” or “I’m not a gossip!” or makes any of her other usual protestations.

One thing Burke and Mrs Johnson have in common is a tender regard for well-meaning governess Vicki. The séance was very hard on Vicki, because her body was the scene of a battle between the ghost of Josette Collins and blonde fire witch Laura. Josette had possessed Vicki in order to warn the company about Laura, but Laura used her own powers to drive Josette from Vicki before she could say her name. Now Vicki is spending the day sick in bed. After talking with Burke, Mrs Johnson goes back to Collinwood and takes it upon herself to keep anyone from bothering Vicki.

The first person to try to see Vicki is visiting parapsychologist Dr Guthrie. Mrs Johnson stands on the stairs and forbids him to go up. He tries to persuade her that, as a doctor, he might be able to help. She responds that the only way he will get to Vicki’s room is by knocking her down and walking over her. At that, he gives up and goes to the drawing room.

Laura then comes to the house and tries to see Vicki. Mrs Johnson takes exactly the same line with her. Laura is more aggressive than Guthrie had been, and tries to walk past Mrs Johnson. Mrs Johnson puts her arm in the way to physically block her. Laura too gives up and goes to the drawing room.

There, she finds Dr Guthrie listening to the audiotape he made of the séance and taking notes. We hear Vicki’s voice desperately muttering about “le tombeau vide” before he sees Laura and shuts the player off. He explains that he does not want anyone who was at the séance to hear the recording, as he does not want it to color their recollections.

Laura and Guthrie talk about the tape recorder and about his use of electronic devices in his work as a scientist. Not even actors as capable as Diana Millay and John Lasell can make this dialogue seem to have much point. But a few weeks ago, friend of the blog Courtley Manor called my attention to a 1957 novel for children, David and the Phoenix, by Edward Ormondroyd. I think there is a reference to that book in this scene.

Ormondroyd’s David is a preteen boy who climbs a mountain and finds himself in a magical realm where he comes face to face with the Phoenix. The Phoenix is initially guarded with David, but relaxes when David says that he doesn’t know any scientists. Evidently the Phoenix’ great goal is to be left alone, and scientists were to learn that there really was such a bird as the Phoenix that goal would forever pass out of reach.

Some of the similarities between Dark Shadows’ “Phoenix” storyline and David and the Phoenix may be the result of common source material. In #140, Laura tells David that her real home is a magical world that sounds quite a bit like the place Ormondroyd’s David stumbles upon. But from the 1930s through the 1960s, the legends of the Holy Grail were a staple of university English departments in the USA, and many of those associate the Phoenix with just such places. So it could be that both Edward Ormondroyd and Malcolm Marmorstein had read Wolfram of Eschenbach or someone like him. And “David” was an extremely common name for boys born in the USA in the 1940s and 1950s, so that could be a coincidence.

But when The Scientist appears in Ormondroyd’s book and emerges as the great enemy of the Phoenix, Ormondroyd presents The Scientist in terms of his equipment. He must wait for his equipment to arrive before he can act against the Phoenix, he puts a great deal of effort into transporting his equipment and setting it up, and he suffers his climactic defeat when the Phoenix sabotages his equipment. So readers of Ormondroyd’s book would have to see a nod to it in this conversation between Guthrie the Scientist and Laura the Phoenix.

After Laura has left, Guthrie calls urgently to Mrs Johnson. He asks her if she touched the tape recorder. She tells him she wouldn’t touch the machine with a ten-foot pole. He plays the tape back, and shows that the sounds of the séance have been replaced with the sounds of a crackling fire. Ormondroyd’s readers will remember that The Scientist did not give up after the Phoenix destroyed his equipment, and will expect Guthrie to try to find new ways to fight Laura.

When we heard the crackling on the tape, Mrs Acilius jokingly asked me when the show was made. “This was before Watergate, right?” Yes, indeed; Dark Shadows was not making a reference to the 18 1/2 minute gap in the Nixon tapes. While the consensus among scholars today is that that gap was caused accidentally, it is amusing to imagine that someone in the White House in those days was a Dark Shadows fan and took a page from Laura’s book. I guess the president’s daughter Tricia was into the show for a while, but even if the erasure were deliberate she wouldn’t have been a very likely suspect.

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.