E-Mail This Article to a Friend MARK OF THE VAMPIRE

The ever-hammy Lionel Barrymore, brother of John and Ethel, is the name above the title of Mark of the Vampire. The MGM star goes slumming in this 1935 genre flick, arriving in the middle of the Middle European–set film as a local professor who affirms the anti-rationalist arguments of half the characters that unexplained neck wounds, bats flying ominously against windows, and Béla Lugosi in his Count Dracula outfit lurking about all probably add up to . . . VAMPIRES!!! Mighty Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer disguised itself as Universal Pictures, home of "B" horror movies, for this effort, creating a Gypsies-and-graveyards cobwebbed ambiance, but the film gets tiresome and talky, even at its 61-minute length; and Tod Browning (Freaks, Dracula) proves, as always, a cinematically sluggish director, no matter how alluring his subject matter. There is a fascinating lesbian subtext, however, with Lugosi’s pale goth somnambulist daughter, Luna (Carol Borland), getting mesmerized by the film’s Garbo-acting feline heroine (Elizabeth Allan). Mark of the Vampire shows on a bill with Browning’s 77-minute 1926 silent The Blackbird, which stars Lon Chaney in a dual role as the jewel-thieving Blackbird and the charity-charged Bishop.