Mark of the Vampire (MGM, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Mark of the Vampire is, if anything, an even quirkier movie, a remake of a now-lost 1927 silent called London After Midnight which Tod Browning had directed and Lon Chaney, Sr. had starred. Based on an original story by Browning called The Hypnotist, London After Midnight starred Chaney in one of his many sort-of dual roles: as a Scotland Yard inspector out to solve a mysterious murder and a supposed vampire who’s really the inspector in disguise. (Quite a few of Chaney’s films depended for their payoff on the revelation that the two wildly different-looking people he’d played in the bulk of the film turned out to be the same.) For Mark of the Vampire Browning and his writers, Guy Endore and Bernard Schubert, moved the setting of the story to Vampire Central, Transylvania, and cast Lionel Barrymore as the supposed vampire expert and Bela Lugosi and Carroll Borland (a protégée of his and one of his girlfriends even though he was married to someone else) as the vampire and the original “Bat Girl” played by Edna Tichenor in London After Midnight. In some ways Mark of the Vampire is a film you want to like better than you do; after all, Browning had directed Lugosi in the 1930 film of Dracula, which had been a real disappointment: stage-bound (Universal ordered it based on the intervening play by Hamilton Deane, as tweaked by John L. Balderston for Broadway audiences, rather than directly from Bram Stoker’s novel) and surprisingly dull, ill-directed and badly acted other than by Lugosi, Edward Van Sloan and Dwight Frye.

So when I read that Browning and Lugosi had teamed up for another vampire movie five years after Dracula, this time with a more prestigious studio and a bigger budget (as well as five years’ worth of advances in the art of sound film), I was hoping the two had made up for their missed opportunity with Dracula and this time made a masterpiece. What I hadn’t reckoned with was Browning’s hatred of the supernatural; his films with Chaney had all been based on stories that, as outrageously melodramatic as some of them were, were at least physically possible. Like Chaney’s two best-known films, Wallace Worsley’s The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame (1923) and Rupert Julian’s (and Edward Sedgwick’s) The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the roles he played in his films with Browning were physically deformed but still recognizably human. It’s hard to imagine Chaney in Dracula (even though that was the original plan and only Chaney’s death led Universal to press Lugosi into service as his on-screen replacement) precisely because he didn’t like playing supernatural characters, and aside from that one time Browning never made a movie featuring one. In Mark of the Vampire Lugosi is a sinister presence, lurking around the action along with Carroll Borland as his “vampire bride,” and at the end he’s revealed to be not a real vampire but an actor posing as a vampire as part of the scheme of Lionel Barrymore’s character, Professor Zelin, to prove that Baron Otto (Jean Hersholt, the only actor in both The Mask of Fu Manchu and Mark of the Vampire) killed Sir Karrell Borotyn (Holmes Herbert), father of ingénue Irena Borotyn (Elizabeth Allan). Though Sir Karrell is dead at the start of the story, part of the scheme is to hire an actor to impersonate him to get Baron Otto to re-enact the murder and show just how he was able to kill the real Sir Karrell and drain the blood from his body to make it look like the work of a vampire.

The police chief from London After Midnight is here renamed “Inspector Neumann” and is played by Lionel Atwill, whose power and authority help make this film; indeed, at times Atwill seems to be stealing the movie right out from under both Barrymore and Lugosi. My husband Charles liked this film better than I did; he said that the middle third of it seemed to come closer to the world of Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel than any of the films ostensibly based on it (though to my mind the best-ever adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula was the 1938 Mercury Theatre on the Air radio show written by, directed by and starring Orson Welles, which drew on the sexual implications of the vampire myth far more than any of the film versions; once Welles as Dracula embarked on his seduction of Agnes Moorehead as Mina Harker with a weird parody of the Communion ritual, proclaiming her “flesh of my flesh … blood of my blood!,” he had me). But to me it’s yet another disappointment, a good film that could easily have been great and yet one more misuse of Lugosi’s talent. Apparently Browning decided that he’d be more sinister if he were kept silent, so we don’t hear any of the fabled Lugosi voice until the very end, when he and Borland are packing up their actors’ gear and getting ready to go to their next job. Ironically, MGM had Lugosi narrate the original trailer for Mark of the Vampire, and he gets more dialogue in the trailer than he does in the actual movie! Then again, for all Lugosi’s fabled association with vampires in general and Dracula in particular, he only played a vampire on screen five times: Dracula, Mark of the Vampire, Return of the Vampire (an attempt by Columbia to do a direct sequel to Dracula, only Universal’s legal department caught them and forced them to tweak the script so instead of playing Dracula, Lugosi became “Dr. Armand Tesla”), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire – and the last two were comic spoofs.