Was Episode 1104 Mrs Johnson's last appearance?

I do appreciate her brilliant thesping so much, watching the series as an adult...

G.

Over the past weekend, I took several breaks from catching up with various domestic routines to revisit set number seven of the DVD series.  In particular, the memorable episode in which an hysterical Julia discovered the *true nature* of Dr. Lang's experiment and was hollering into the phone to the operator to connect her to the police, "qu-HICK-ick-ick-icklyeeee, QUICKLY!" only to be told by Barnabas to "remember someone."

Despite the gaffe, I found Julia's next line to be beautifully understated:  "You always win, Barnabas."

Barn replies something like "We checkmate one another."

And Julia sadly and quietly demurs:  "No, you stop me but I seldom am able to stop you."

I thought it was a brilliant little moment, perfectly encapsulating a lot of the relationship between these too.... and it came in the wake of one of the most notorious blunders in the series' history!

G.

Am I completely ga-ga (hardly surprising) or is today our illustrious anniversary when we celebrate Forty-One magnificent, chiaroscuro-laden, horrifying years of Dark Shadows!  It seems to me that it was on this day, June 27, in 1966, when those fateful words "My name is Victoria Winters..." first hit the airwaves.

Here's to Collinwood, to Dan and his dream, to the Great House and All Who Live There... and to us, for keeping it going all these years.

cheers, Gothick

Another YouTube gem.  Thayer's performance as Nero Wolfe is one of my all-time favorites.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHQs8N2pPsw

Enjoy!

Gothick

Greetings Fans,

Last weekend, a friend I haven't seen in awhile came to visit and brought a few goodies to loan out.  Among them was a bootlegged set of the short-lived British anthology series, Journey to the Unknown.  I'm not sure how I missed ever seeing this show since it ran on ABC in the US during the 1968-69 season; I can only guess that they may have given it a 10 p.m. timeslot due to the "adult" themes and that WAS past my bedtime that year.

The series was produced with US money and the format involved a British cast, location and production facilities (through fabled Hammer studios, as it happens) but with a US guest star featured as the lead in each show.  Episodes I have seen to date featured folks such as Patty Duke, George Maharis, Robert Reed, Robert Lansing, etc.

Robert Lansing's episode is based upon a classic ghost story by the now-forgotten author Oliver Onions, "The Beckoning Fair One."  The adaptation for this series updated the original tale (set I believe in the 1920s or 1930s) to the present day (i.e. 1968) and changed quite a bit of the story.  What I wasn't prepared for was how close certain set-pieces in this version seemed to be to certain details of the second feature film, Night of Dark Shadows (filmed in the Spring of 1971).

Like Quentin Collins in NoDS, the lead character in "Beckoning Fair One" is a painter, come to England to have his first one-man show in a London art gallery.  Instead of inheriting a haunted mansion, he rents one with his fiancee (played by English actress Gabrielle Drake, the sister of legendary singer-songwriter Nick Drake).  The title refers to the portrait of a woman who lived in the house in the 1930s and 1940s, a Rebecca (or Angelique!) like femme fatale whose mocking ghostly laugher is heard FREQUENTLY throughout the story.  (The laughter does remind me of the unseen cackling of our very own Favorite Witch.)

As in NoDS, the painter quickly becomes obsessed with his ghostly paramour, locking himself up in his studio, doing portrait after portrait of his Beckoning Fair One, and lashing out violently to his fiancee when she ignores the signs of his deteriorating grip upon reality.

I know Sam Hall had to pull a script out of his hat VERY quickly during preparations for the second feature film.  It would be interesting if he had seen The Beckoning Fair One on ABC and put that together with memories of the AIP feature The Haunted Palace and some of his own ideas together to produce the narrative and concept for Night of Dark Shadows.

G.

Greetings Cousins,

Last weekend I checked out from the Library the new (released August of '06) two-disc release of the 1944 classic Double Indemnity.  I was quite surprised to learn that the set included a 1973 TV-movie remake (of whose existence I had previously been unaware), and even more surprised to find "Kathleen Cody" in the role of Samantha Eggar's stepdaughter, Lola.

Cody has, I think, three scenes in the movie.  The final one makes the biggest splash.  I still find her an irritatingly one-note performer, but for those who admire her work, they'll want to check this out.

G.

I've been revisiting some of the 1991 remake episodes of our beloved series.  I was tickled to see that the writers brought back the old notion of a Tarot card identified by the Countess du Pres as "the wicked woman."  As we've discussed on a number of occasions on this forum, there is no such card in any orthodox edition of the Tarot.

I had speculated that the Countess may have been in the habit of regarding one of the standard cards of the Tarot as "the Wicked Woman" because it tended to reveal the presence of a female intent on mischief.  I believe I speculated that the card might have been one of the Queens.

I was amused to see two different episodes in which the Countess exclaimed "the wicked woman!" in the midst of a Tarot reading and on both occasions, the camera showed us which card she had just drawn.  On the first occasion it was the Queen of Pentacles, and on the second, the Queen of Swords.

Of course, there is still a broad streak of anachronism here.  There were no commercially available tarot decks around in the 1780s/90s, and a French aristocrat such as the Countess would have undoubtedly commissioned her own deck.  It would have given the French names for the Major and Minor Arcana.  Pentacles did not come into play on Tarot cards until the publication of the so-called "Rider Waite Deck" (the work of mystic and artist Pamela Colman Smith, working from descriptive outlines supplied by Golden Dawn initiate and master A. E. Waite) in 1910.  A deck created in the 1780s or earlier would like have used coins (deniers) in the suit that eventually became diamonds in standard playing cards and pentacles in most Tarot decks.  This was the case with the Marseilles deck and the popular Swiss "IJJ" deck around 1800--either would have been a suitable prop for the Countess to use.  Instead, however, the production crew provided her with what looks like a typical 1980s "Aquarian Age" type deck, complete with card designations in English.

Well, after all, the show was "filmed on location in Beverly Hills"!

I have to say that this time around, I was more impressed than I expected to be by Lysette Anthony's performance as Angelique.  It's really unfortunate that the breakneck pace of the series, and the calibre of the scripts, did not give her more to do in the role.  I've seen her in UK productions and she's a fine craftswoman as an actress.

G.

So, yesterday I was watching some 1897 episodes... not actually watching whole shows but just fast forwarding around to various scenes... and I saw one of the early scenes between Tim and Amanda.  And Tim actually informed Amanda that her face was full of "wisdom and innocence."   I just about died.

I couldn't think of anything that could top Trask's line about Abigail's "kindly, loving face" but this did the trick.

G.