Black Friday (1940)
Directed by Arthur Lubin

Film Review

By the time they came to make Black Friday, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were in danger of looking like a double act.  They had previously featured together in four films for Universal, including the excellent The Black Cat (1934), and whilst Lugosi reputedly resented Karloff's greater success, the actors worked well together.  Their final film for Universal initially boded well for their on-screen partnership, with Lugosi playing a scientist who would perform a brain operation on Karloff that would give him a split personality.  It was variation on the original Frankenstein film that had made Karloff famous and a virtual re-tread of the duo's previous encounter in The Raven (1935).  Unfortunately, Karloff was having none of it.  He insisted that he should play the scientist role and Lugosi ended up being demoted to a lesser supporting role (a gangster who never actually appears on screen with Karloff).  The pivotal role of the man who gets a brain swap went to a fairly unknown English character actor named Stanley Ridges, who seized the opportunity and gave the performance of his career - so astonishingly different are his portrayals of his character's two personas that you can hardly believe they were played by the same actor.

It's hard not to feel slightly short-changed by the stunt pulled by Universal - Lugosi gets top billing after Karloff and yet ends up being relegated to the part of a minor character.  It's also disappointing that the film is essentially just another rehash of the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story, with a borrowed film noir gloss and some hard-to-get-your-head round logic.  Surely, you say to yourself, if Karloff puts Red Cannon's brain into Professor Kingsley's head all trace of Professor Kingsley will disappear and what we'll end up with is Red Cannon in a new body.  Instead, the screenwriters try to convince us that Kingsley somehow manages to hold onto his old persona and magically transforms his appearance whenever the Red Cannon side of him gains the upper hand.  It makes no sense unless (a) by 'brain transplant' Karloff means to place only a portion of Red Cannon's brain into Kingsley's head and (b) Professor Kingsley is a remarkably fast quick-change artist.  The highly suspect plot is attributed to Curt Siodmak, who would later re-work it slightly more convincingly for his novel Donovan's Brain.

Arthur Lubin's direction also has a great deal at fault and there are times when you feel he is slipping, like Stanley Ridges, into another register, away from film noir thriller into the kind of knockabout comedy that was more naturally his forte (his early successes were films for Abbott and Costello).  Played as an all-out comedy, Black Friday might well have been ten times more enjoyable and its dubious logic would then not have been an issue.  Instead, what Lubin delivers is a fairly lacklustre B-movie thriller in which Karloff and Lugosi's presence almost fails to have any impact but which is miraculously salvaged by Stanley Ridges in one of cinema's best Jekyll and Hyde rip-offs.  Black Friday in no way lives up to your expectations but it rewards in ways you could hardly have imagined, and in any event it's more entertaining than Lubin's subsequent horror bash, Universal's lacklustre 1943 remake of The Phantom of the Opera.

Film Synopsis

When George Kingsley, a professor of English literature, is knocked down by a car driven by gangster boss Red Cannon his chances of survival are minimal.  His best friend, the eminent surgeon Dr Ernest Sovac, sees only one way of saving his life, which is to transplant another man's brain into his head.  It so happens that Red Cannon is lying in an adjacent hospital bed, crippled from the injuries he sustained in the accident.  The operation is an apparent success but Professor Kingsley shows signs of fatigue and Dr Sovac suggest he takes a holiday, accompanying him to New York.  Sovac suspects that Red Cannon's memory still persists in Kingsley's new brain, and if that is so his friend might be able to lead him to the stolen 500 thousand dollars that the hoodlum is reputed to have hidden somewhere in the city.  Sovac's theory is correct and it isn't long before Kingsley finds himself completely taken over by Red Cannon's persona.  The mild-manner professor becomes a ruthless killer, determined to take revenge against the members of his former gang...