good god!

doctor julia hoffman in brown cotton pants? perish the thought!

give me moss green tweed! give me a white labcoat! give me anything besides that.

yes i was surprised at how poor the quality of copy was. usually 'reel thirteen' uses good copies.

the film was made in 1946 but visually it was so antiquated it looked like something from the 1920's or 30's. perhaps it's never been digitally restored.

the plot was pretty convoluted but joan was great. i thought maybe she's be too "patrician" to pull off the scarlet woman convincingly but she did. lots of fun.

gothick dear i believe the shape is a "leg of mutton" sleeve. "muttonchop" would be quentin's sideburns.

as i recall lara parker was outfitted exquisitely as mrs roger collins. because she had not been with the series before the 1795 storyline she was granted a lavish new wardrobe of "present time" clothing in 1968 while the rest of the cast recycled their 66-67 duds.

wasn't green sort of her unofficial color? apple. pistachio. mint. was there some sort of symbolism there(envy)? she made her grand entrance at collinwood in some sort of boxy green cape if i recall.

there was one episode where she wore a cropped poppy red jacket and short purple skirt. it struck me as very 1980's looking. with her glossy black curls sort of joan collins as alexis-carrington-colby-ish. anyways i thought she looked fab.

b.t.w. the orange ruffled minidress the other model in the picture is wearing looks to me like one of the bizare 1970 parallel-time frocks.

that's almost as good as bringing up the long gone(and safely tucked away)victoria winters during the leviathan arc only to have her unceremoniously "killed-off" yet again.

talk about no pay off.

i know what you mean gothick...

since i've spent so much time with these people they are in a funny way "real" to me in a way that no other film/television characters are.

no matter how many other actresses have played liz since the definitive joan bennett portrayal nor however many might play her in future projects based on the series for me joan IS elizabeth collins stoddard. the voice. the mannerisms. the insane chartrues caftan thing. it all adds up to the real mccoy for me if such a thing can accurately be said about a completely fictitious person.

on today's classic "microphone" gaffe...

whenever i see mitch ryan in the early barnabas eps i get the uncanny sense of dead man walking.

you just know the actor's on his way out and the character of burke devlin drastically repositioned for the new era.

they're strange episodes to watch in retrospect.

needless to say all of this could be explained this way...

barnabas was not originally intended to be the romatic antihero of the whole thing. he was supposed to be scary. accordingly they cast a middle aged actor because up to that point the familiar vampire wasn't "young" but of the christopher lee/peter cushing school. creepy middel aged guys.

once he had morphed into the guilt-ridden anti-hero they probably decided to shave a decade or two off his age to make him more of a romantic lead.

and as someone else pointed out since julia was a doctor with her own hospital(and peer of dr. woodard)she was probable cast correctly as a middle aged woman.