John Melvin Bleifer was an American actor whose career began at the end of the silent film era, and lasted through the mid-1980s. He appeared in feature films and film serials, and in a number of television series and miniseries. Bleifer also acted on stage, and appeared in several Broadway productions.

The Mark of Zorro is a 1940 American black-and-white swashbuckling film released by 20th Century-Fox, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, and starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, and Basil Rathbone. The supporting cast features Eugene Pallette, Gale Sondergaard, and Robert Lowery. The film is based on the novel The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley, originally published in 1919 in five serialized installments in All-Story Weekly, which introduced the masked hero Zorro; the story is set in Southern California during the early 19th century. After the enormous success of the silent 1920 film adaptation, the novel was republished under that name by Grosset & Dunlap. The Mark of Zorro was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score. The film was named to the National Film Registry in 2009 by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant", and to be preserved for all time.