In short: Mark of the Vampire (1935)

Backlot Europe - though this time, this is meant to be close to Prague, so the proceedings do nominally not quite occur in the dream-like places this suggests.

Sir Borotyn (Holmes Herbert) is found dead in his house, probably murdered. However, the only wounds on his body are two little wounds on his neck through which his body seems to have been drained of blood. For most of the men around, like Borotyn’s close buddy Baron Otto von Zinden (Jean Hersholt) and the family doctor, this naturally means he has been killed by a vampire. That’s a particularly good bet in this particular case since Borotyn’s house is supposedly cursed by and with a vampire, one Count Mora (Bela Lugosi). And since we the audience will soon enough see dear old Bela hanging around doing his vampire thing, accompanied by his vampire daughter, Luna (Caroll Borland), it seems like a good bet, even though the investigating copper (Lionel Atwill), freshly arrived from Prague, poo-poos the theory as mere superstition.

He doesn’t even change his tone when Borotyn’s daughter Irena (Elizabeth Allan) is threatened by the terrible twosome. Fortunately, one Professor Zelen (Lionel Barrymore), an expert on the occult and particularly vampires is called in to help solve the little bloodsucking problem.

Which is all fine and good until the film reveals the whole vampire thing as a ridiculously contrived method to get at Borotyn’s true killer, turning Tod Browning’s Mark of the Vampire into one of the pioneers of idiot plot twists in movies that make the supernatural solutions to the plot seem downright plausible.

Not that the film has been all fun and gothic games beforehand, for while there are a handful of genuinely atmospheric and interesting scenes, mostly concerning Luna or the Count hovering dreamlike in gardens or corners (the photography by James Wong Howe is lovely), there’s rather a lot of painful comedy to get through for such a short film. This situation is not improved by the broadness with which particularly Atwell, Barrymore and Hersholt approach their roles. Given the combined pedigrees of these gentlemen, it’s highly likely this is done on purpose, lending rather a lot of credence to interpreting the film as a satire like quite a few later critics like Kim Newman do.


Of course, there’s little point to a satire that doesn’t comment intelligently on the genre it sends up – particularly if its jokes are of the painful 1930s type – and I can’t see much of an actual comment on the genre as it was in 1935 here, so even believing that’s what Browning meant Mark of the Vampire to be, I still can’t find much to appreciate in it except for Howe’s photography and about ten minutes Browning magic.

The Devil-Doll (1936)

Scientist Marcel (Henry B. Walthall) and his prison buddy Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore) manage to escape from the famed Devil’s Island. They make their way to the research hut where Marcel’s by now batshit insane wife Malita (Rafeaela Ottiano) has been continuing his research work for a decade or so. Marcel, you see, is worried about the future of an ever-growing humanity in a world with finite resources. His solution to the problem is obvious: develop a method to shrink down organic life, and food problems for the now tiny human population will shrink as well. One hopes he’s also planning to create an particularly effective insecticide.

And wouldn’t you know it, while Marcel was imprisoned, he had quite a bit of thinking time and found the solution that will actually make his idea work. He just manages to finish up with his work before he dies from the consequences of his dramatic flight, leaving Lavond and Malita to deepen and finish his research. Lavond has his own ideas about how to go about this, for he has reasons to seek revenge. Lavond was sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit, framed by his business partners, leaving him in prison, his wife soon dead of the financial and social strain following his conviction, and his daughter Lorraine (Maureen O’Sullivan) embittered and sad. Lavond’s goal isn’t just revenge, it’s also to clear his name and secure a future for Lorraine.

All of which he might just manage to achieve with the help of two servants turned into mind-controlled doll people and quite a bit of cross-dressing.

For yes, Lionel Barrymore does indeed spend large parts of the film cross-dressing as an old lady, in a move that must have been pretty transgressive for its time and certainly fits well into director Tod Browning’s love for shaking up the squares in his audience (whenever the studios let him). However, neither Browning nor Barrymore treat this element of the film as particular out there, instead using it in a matter of course way that’s pretty refreshing and effective. It’s still weird, mind you, but only in that particular way that belongs to films taking place in a heightened reality where going undercover as old ladies is just what revenge seeking men do. One can’t help but think that Lavond would have quite a bit to talk about with a certain French fake hunchback.

Particularly Barrymore’s performance is lovely, never playing the cross-dressing for humour, nor showing the discomfort in his body language you get from a lot of actors getting into drag. He is also finding a wonderful balance between portraying Lavond as your typical horror movie maniac and a sad, old man who lost everything he loved for no fault of his own. The script (in theory based on Abraham Merritt’s “Burn Witch Burn” but in reality only taking a couple of ideas and names from it) by Browning, Guy “Werewolf of Paris” Endore, Garrett Fort and Erich von Stroheim(!) provides him with ample opportunity to make his character rather more complex than is typical in this sort of thing, too, adding a sadness to the character that feels well-earned. And how many horror movies do you know in which the man seeking revenge in somewhat unnatural ways also helps his daughter’s romance along, even if it is to an ambitious taxi driver with the rather unfortunate name of Toto.


For a film made in the mid 1930’s the special effects are very effective too, Browning using a combination of back projection,  larger-than-life sets and clever camera angles to make the “devil dolls” rather believable, often even a little creepy, and generally bizarre. There’s also a lovely sense of macabre creativity on display, with excellent flourishes like the final doll being delivered as a Christmas ornament to its victim. Which, in combination with the surprisingly friendly, yet not undeservedly so, ending, also turns this into an early example of the Christmas horror movie, now that I think about it.

On Rewatching Dracula (1931)

I'm changing up my usual format a bit today because nobody needs to hear a plot synopsis of the first classic Universal horror movie.

If you're just joining us, young grasshopper, be advised that Tod Browning's Dracula isn't based directly on Bram Stoker's novel but on a stage play by Hamilton Deane that was later rewritten by John L. Balderston and makes some sensible and some very curious changes to the novel. Some of the latter may make more sense on the stage than on screen, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Browning would have preferred Dracula to be played by his old partner in crime Lon Chaney (senior) but Universal insisted on very successful stage Dracula Bela Lugosi. Consequently, Browning had one or more hissy fits and did not bring his full creative power to the proceedings because he found his ego more important than his movie. As far as can be said today, parts of the film were really directed by supreme cinematographer Karl Freund. This part of the film's backstory has made an easy in for a lot of critics to take the film down a peg. It's difficult to completely disagree with the brunt of their arguments, for the film is often rather more stagy than necessary with too many scenes of characters telling us important plot developments instead of the film showing them (though I don't think it's all the play's fault - some of the scenes that are only told, especially Dracula feeding his blood to Mina, would just have not gone over on screen in 1931, pre-code era or not), and Browning is visually far less imaginative than in those of his films he deigned to care about. Having said this, to me there's so much about Dracula that is a remarkable achievement I can't help but have the impression these critics are so in love with mourning a film that never was they don't look at the film that actually exists with an open mind.

It's true, Browning is not at all at the top of his game here, and especially the dialogue scenes that make up most of the film's middle are filmed with little élan or interest, but all of the film's big horror set pieces are moody and brilliant and staged with a care many filmmakers don't bring to the table when they are at their best. Then there's Freund's beautiful cinematography, Charles D. Hall's impressive art direction that sets up rules of the visual treatment of gothic horror by way of German expressionism generations would go on to follow. Freund's and Hall's contributions to the film really give the joyful impression - in a fog-shrouded doom and dread kind of way - of something happening on screen for the first time.

And then there's Bela, of course. One could make fun of the curious stiffness and theatricality of the great man's performance, but then one would rather miss out on the fact how nuanced what he's doing here actually is. Lugosi doesn't play the Count as a romantic, several hundred years old noble with a lust for blood, but as a creature that may once have been human and vaguely remembers some of the surface aspects of acting like a human being. There's a reason that Lugosi's accent is thicker whenever Dracula lets his mask drop completely, and it's the same reason why he's moving less corpse-stiff in those scenes where he's trying to fit into society, even though each of his gestures then is still slightly off. This Dracula is not a dead man walking, but something deeply inhuman pretending to be a man, and for my taste, Lugosi realizes that aspect of the role brilliantly.

I also think most of the rest of the cast does their job rather well. Helen Chandler's Mina is quite a bit more convincing than one would expect going by the generally pale performances of female romantic leads of the era. Dwight Frye does an important step to be forever type-cast as the bug-eyed madman, and while this interpretation of mental illness is of course as dubious as that of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, his performance has a strong, melodramatic (in all the best senses of the word) power that perfectly fits Lugosi's performance as well as Edward van Sloan's Dutch accent by way of Hollywood-Hindustan and Hollywood-China. No, we're not in method acting land here, but in a film where intelligently melodramatic and artificial acting come together with ideas and methods of German cinematic expressionism and Hollywood commercialism to create more than just the first horror house style in cinematic history but a foggy, shadowy, weirdly accented world of its own.

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