I'm Greater Than Any Real Vampire!

 

I really had no intentions on revisiting Mark of the Vampire (1935), as I had watched it earlier this year. But it was on Turner Classics so I thought it might make for a nice Saturday morning start to a fun classics marathon. It is at 60 minutes and Lugosi in such form as a Dracula type with Carroll Borland as his protege, even if I find the twist frustrating as a Gothic horror fan, there are some fun tropes Director Tod Browning includes I appreciate. The opening with the castle of the murdered Sir Karell (Holmes Herbert) now "occupied" by Count Mora and his daughter, Luna, as they move through the cob-webbed, bat-infested, beetle-armied estate, with its disrepair and lack of attention a visible reminder of the owner's death and his supposed friend and neighbor, Baron Otto (Jean Hersholt) allowing it to decay, actually later revealed to be responsible for the death, a twist that told us there were no vampires. Nonetheless, we are convinced until perhaps fifteen or so minutes left into the film that Mora and Luna killed Karell and another local, eventually turning their attentions to Karell's daughter, Irena (Elizabeth Allan) and her fiance (Henry Wadsworth). I enjoy this for Donald Meek, more of a figure in the first thirty minutes, with his jitters and rattled nerves, surely insulted by Atwill's inspector's ill response to vampires and bodies drained of blood. Jessie Ralph (as the maid) and Ivan Simpson (as the butler) get the heebie jeebies a lot, encountering Lugosi in one scene Browning shoots as a flashback after the two of them scream and run downstairs in fright. Lionel Barrymore calling the hired help idiots and fools because they made honest mistakes doesn't exactly ingratiate him to the audience...they weren't privy to his ruse to lure Otto towards revealing his methods behind the vampire killings. That ending with Lugosi's "I'm greater than any real vampire!" and Luna (with the props department guy) erupting his grandeur is amusing still after multiple viewings...a moment Browning really winked at the audience, even at the cost of the extravagance of the supernatural story that could have remained intact instead.