Mark of the Vampire

I wouldn't call it a favorite, but the ending never bothered me. Reading CLASSICS OF THE HORROR FILM spoiled it for me, so it didn't affect my watching it for the first time on TNT one night (the second half- beginning with the trip to the crypt- which led to my first experience of Lon Chaney's voice with the follow-up broadcast of THE UNHOLY THREE'30). The film showed film's first bat transformation and the first vampire hiss.

Since I haven't seen it myself I don't have any opinion, but the ending is revealed in many books. So if I did indeed see it one day I would instead have searched for clues along the way to see why it ended as it did, just like any good detective would do.

Tod Browning, once a man who made many profits for MGM in the silent days, must have seamed like fish out of water by the time this movie was made, as MGM was stearing into more wholesome and polished entertainment by 1935 "even the B-movies have to look like A-movies" policy and "more stars than there is in heaven" slogan.

I found Mark Of The Vampire enjoyable and fun, with its thrills less frightening than engaging, as in they drew me in, kept the film going. The art direction and (I believe it's James Wong Howe's) camerawork are outstanding. It's MGM, and, and, as one might expect, and feels classy as hell.

Welllllll, I gave MOTV another look when TCM ran it again last month and, while I haven't altered my opinion from earlier this year, I have formed some further impressions. 

The first is one of overproduced excess: there's just a little too much of everything. It's as though MGM, conscious of its opulently glossy and bejeweled status as the Rolls Royce of movie factories, operated with the mindset, "Anything they can do, we can do better...we're MGM!" So the stately silence of Lugosi's descent of castle stairs in Dracula is gussied up on MGM's nearly-identical set with more cobwebs, fluid crane shots, cutaways to creepy creatures, bats sailing past the lens and an omnipresent sound effect combining howling winds and a ghostly, moaning chorus.

It's rather akin to the effect of their spate of musical remakes in the '50s, when all the color, stereophonic sound and widescreen they could throw at new versions of films like Showboat, Roberta and The Women couldn't disguise the bloodless and hollow nature of exercises that drained the charm from those properties, substituting polished spectacle for sincerity.

And perhaps sincerity is what's most absent from MOTV. For all the static characteristics of its late-1930, "dawn of the talkies" primitiveness, Dracula is earnest where MOTV merely apes. Could that be the aspect that opens to door to questions about parody? I note in passing that the final "twist" scene is a carbon copy of one toward the end of MGM's own Bombshell (1933), itself a satiric look at film stardom, in which a snooty family of Boston bluebloods whose respectability tempts beleaguered actress Lola Burns (Jean Harlow) away from her tabloid headline existence is revealed as stock players hired by the studio publicity chief to make a point to her about staying where she belongs (which, come to think of it, harkens to any number of their Andy Hardys or Joan Crawford rags-to-riches melodramas, along with The Wizard Of OZ, themselves the objects of much parody).

I wonder, then, if "camp" isn't a word more applicable to MOTV than "parody." I came across the following definition of the former: "Something that provides sophisticated, knowing amusement by being artlessly mannered or stylized, self-consciously artificial and extravagant, or teasingly ingenuous in a theatrical manner." 

By 1935, Universal was injecting that element into its own product, supplanting the subdued grimness of Frankenstein or The Black Cat with the colorful whimsy of The Bride Of Frankenstein and scenery-chewing theatricality of The Raven. Their one "play it straight" horror entry of that year, The Werewolf Of London, flopped. Maybe there was a "something in the air" evolution of tastes occurring by that time, whereby audiences no longer wished to take their scares too seriously, and to which the MOTV "twist" gave both its acknowledgement and assent.     

The bemusement's understandable. Even if one chooses to take a reference like "batthorn" as not intended to evoke the earlier "wolfbane," the giant exclamation point that the "twist" scene puts to the final-reel revelation of the ruse seems unmistakable: how could that not have been engineered to "leave 'em laughing?" 

But we're stuck with evaluating these things from a decades-later perspective without benefit of the context of an earlier age. While I stand by my evaluation of Dracula as earnest, I now recall that it originally came with its own "tag" that was probably still fresh in many a 1935 viewer's mind: Edward Van Sloan's now-long-lost curtain speech ("There are such things!"). Without seeing it, there's no way to know in what spirit it was to be taken: leave 'em laughing or send 'em home to sleep with the lights on? 

And I also now recall that 1943's otherwise-serious Return Of the Vampire supplied its own fourth-wall-breaking wink at audiences when a grinning Miles Mander posed the question of belief in vampires directly to them through the camera lens: "Do you?"  

So I dunno, maybe your friend on the other board is taking MOTV in that vein: just an innocuous little fade-out gag that doesn't necessarily offer commentary on anything going before it.

Oh, and never mind the fee. With all my "perhapses," "could it bes" and "I wonders," I figure we come out even. 
   

Thanks for bumping this thread up and discussing it! It gave me the chance to watch this film. I hadn't heard of it before, and found it entertaining. I've never seen a film from the 30's take such a drastic turn in the story. A turn where everyone but one character and the entire audience is in on it.

The film did indeed to me have a campy feel to it. Until I was in on the twist, I thought it was an early effort by MGM to "check the boxes" for a vampire movie as laid out by "Dracula". It does give one something to ponder, was the box checking feel because of the actual first effort by MGM at replicating the formula the Universal created, or was it because the characters in the film were so good that they played it all along as police and family trying to fool the Baron?

Either way, a pleasure to watch.