!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW GIVES AWAY PLOT TWISTS!!
Four years after taking the title role in Dracula (1931), Bela Lugosi was back in his second vampire role in Mark of the Vampire, directed for MGM by his Dracula colleague, Tod Browning, who had barely worked since the furore surrounding Freaks in 1932, only bagging a solitary uncredited job at MGM directing the drama Fast Workers (1933) starring John Gilbert. It’s a much more interesting film than Dracula, more dynamic and the disappointing twist ending notwithstanding, an altogether more adventurous affair, though the script takes us off into a very convoluted mystery that’s far more complex than it really needs to be and in the end doesn’t make all that much sense.
Notionally, it’s a remake of Browning‘s own London After Midnight from 1927, horror cinema’s most famous lost work. Sir Karell Borotyn (Holmes Herbert) is murdered and a pair of tiny marks are discovered on his neck. Dr Doskil (Donald Meek) and Sir Karell’s friend Baron Otto von Zinden (Jean Hersholt) believe that he was the victim of a vampire, Count Mora (Lugosi), and his undead daughter Luna (Carroll Borland). Police Inspector Neumann (Lionel Atwill) is having none of it. Fearing that Sir Karell’s daughter Irena (Elizabeth Allan) will be the next victim, Professor Zelen (Lionel Barrymore), an expert on vampires and the occult, is summoned to help, In an increasingly unlikely turn of events, Zelen hypnotizes Otto to make him relive the night of the murder and the “vampires” are revealed to be actors, hired by Zelen to help him confirm his suspicion that Otto was the real killer.
Browning and Lugosi were on familiar ground here and there’s more than an echo or two of Dracula, so much so that it’s been suggested that Universal were considering legal action. It’s a far more atmospheric film than Dracula and Lugosi‘s almost wordless performance is far better than the one he gave at Universal. But there’s no escaping the fact that Guy Endore and Bernard Schubert‘s script (it’s been suggested that it was tinkered with by several other writers including John L. Balderston) is utterly preposterous from beginning to end. The plot hatched by Neumann is extraordinarily and unnecessarily complicated and given that we’re party to several apparently supernatural happenings, it makes no sense at all. The finale infamously reveals that the vampires weren’t real at all, but actors in Neumann’s employ to help him smoke out the culprit. How this ties in with the ability of the “vampires” to transform from bats is anyone’s guess.
Part of the problem might have been that MGM seemed to get cold feet about the finished film and hacked anything up to twenty minutes from it before allowing it to be released. What the missing footage is has long been the subject of some debate, some maintaining that there was an incest subplot at work that the studio balked at. Others have said that it was simply comic relief that was excised but the incest plot – had it existed – might have explained the otherwise unremarked upon bullet wound to Mora’s temple – it’s been suggested that he caused the death of Luna and in a fit of remorse shot himself, a subplot that would have had the upholders of the Production Code twitching from the off.
Of course, nothing could change the fact that the final twist is as feeble as it gets and is simply impossible to reconcile with everything that we’ve seen before. After spending the bulk of the film working up a very creditable Gothic atmosphere, Browning and his writers undermine it with the sort of ending that would become commonplace – and much mocked – in Scooby Doo, Where Are You! (1969-1970). It feels like a throwback to the sort of lily-livered cop-out endings that were common in the 1920s. Lugosi and Borland finally get some light-hearted dialogue (“I gave all of me,” boasts Lugosi, “I was greater than any real vampire”) after the deception has been revealed but it’s just a gag, a silly bit of business that seeks to turn the film into a last-minute comedy. The cast had been reportedly kept in the dark about the twist ending until late into production, all being led to believe that Mora and Luna really are vampires, the better, it was felt, to help them maintain the required intensity. Lugosi and Borland were reportedly less than impressed by the twist, Borland later calling it “absurd.”
Thankfully, the film is a visual triumph, one of the best-looking genre films of the 1930s. It benefits enormously from MGM lavishing a decent budget on it, cinematographer James Wong Howe and art director Cedric Gibbons using it to work their customary magic. And there are some truly remarkable scenes here, from Neumann and Zelen exploring the vampires crypt to Borland swooping in on huge, bat-like wings. The 19-year-old Borland is terrific in the original female vampire role (she gets a lot more screen time than Dracula’s brides ever did), taking an interest in Irena that some have read as being lesbian lust, though given the final twist, that makes no more sense than anything else in the film. She was certainly a huge influence on many a future female vampire and played her part in the creation of Charles Addams’ Morticia. Apart from possibly (it’s not clear) apearing in two short films made prior to Mark of the Vampire and a disputed and still hotly contested supposed uncredited part as one of Ming’s handmaidens in Flash Gordon (1936), it would be her only screen appearance until Fred Olen Ray rediscovered her and cast her in Scalps in 1983 and Biohazard two years later.
If you can ignore the ludicrous machinations of the plot – and that’s a very big if – Mark of the Vampire works as an effectively creepy atmosphere piece, much more so that the stodgy Dracula. On that level, the film is a wonder, full of images that have become indelible from all those books we read as youngsters about horror films, almost all of which had the obligatory two-shot of Lugosi and Borland among other striking images. It’s a gorgeous looking film that feels like Browning was using to parody the success of Dracula with a top-notch cast giving it their all. It’s just such a shame that the story is so ridiculous – perhaps just watch it up to the point just before the reveal and it works a lot better, though the convolutions of Zelen’s plot are never going to hang together entirely satisfactorily (why didn’t he just hypnotise Otto without all the fake vampire business?). Never mind trying to get it all to make any sense, just soak up that glorious Gothic atmosphere instead.
Crew
Tod Browning‘s production; Copyright MCMXXXV [1935] in U.S.A. by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents. Controlled by Loew’s Incorporated; Producer: E.J. Mannix [uncredited]; Screen Play by: Guy Endore and Bernard Schubert; Photographed by: James Wong Howe; Film Editor: Ben Lewis; Gowns by: Adrian; Art Director: Cedric Gibbons; Associates: Harry Oliver, Edwin B. Willis
Cast
Lionel Barrymore (Professor Zelen); Elizabeth Allan (Irene Borotyn); Bela Lugosi (Count Mora); Lionel Atwill (Police Inspector Neumann); Jean Hersholt (Baron Otto von Zinden); Henry Wadsworth (Fedor Vincenté); Donald Meek (Dr J. Doskil); Jessie Ralph (midwife); Ivan Simpson (Jan the butler); Franklyn Ardell (Barney the chauffeur); Leila Bennett (Maria); June Gittelson (Annie the maid); Carroll Borland (Luna Mora); Holmes Herbert (Sir Karell Borotyn); Michael Visaroff (innkeeper)
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