Black Friday begins almost identically to the last Boris Karloff movie I reviewed for this site, Before I Hang. This made my heart sink a little. Dr. Ernest Sovac (Karloff, in kindly doctor who took things too far mode), is about to be executed by electric chair (gallows in the previous film). He accepts his fate but hands his written notes to a journalist representing the only newspaper Sovac deemed fair to him and encourages him to spread his story and get someone to carry on his research. (This plea was delivered as a prepared statement at the sentencing hearing in the previous film.) "Here we go again," I thought. This would be the third Karloff movie in a row for me where he plays a kindly old medical scientist whose research obsessions get him in trouble. I liked those previous movies, but I was ready for something different.
Fortunately, in flashbacks as the journalist reads Sovac's notes, we learn that Sovac is not so kindly after all. He's a manipulative man in the driver's seat of his own ruthless obsessions who can easily set his humanity aside in the name of research. We also get two much more interesting interweaving stories and not a single scene taking place in a test tube-filled laboratory. Hallelujah.
In the small college town of New Castle, Dr. Sovac is best friends with his daughter's English literature professor George Kingsley (Ridges). It's unclear whether this is the New Castle in New York, a small town 36 miles from Manhattan that was once the home of former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley (though it has no college) or the New Castle in Delaware, a small city 125 miles from Manhattan that is the birthplace and possible current home of former UFO guitarist Vinnie Moore. The Delaware New Castle has colleges in and near the city. The mystery will never be solved (unless I missed a line of dialogue), but we do know our characters live and work in a town called New Castle that is reasonably close to Manhattan.
Dr. Sovac, his daughter Jean (Anne Gwynne, the grandmother of Chris Pine, the mother of character actor Gwynne Gilford, and the mother-in-law of Robert Pine, the sergeant on CHiPs), and Prof. Kingsley's wife Margaret (Virginia Brissac) take Kingsley out to dinner to celebrate his upcoming interview for a position at a larger and more prestigious school. Our gang makes a brief pit stop for Kingsley to run an errand before the meal, but Kingsley is in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets caught in the middle of a car chase and shootout between New York gangster Red Cannon and his former cronies, led by Eric Marnay (Lugosi). When Cannon is shot, he plows his automobile into the building Kingsley is standing in front of, gravely injuring the professor.
Back at the hospital, Sovac gets a dark idea. He's already been successfully transplanting animal brains in secret (possibly the reason he lost his job at a major university and ended up in New Castle), why not transplant part of injured gangster Red Cannon's brain into the damaged part of dying buddy Kingsley's brain? The ol' partial brain switcheroo (a favorite plot of co-screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who would later write the novel Donovan's Brain, which was adapted for the screen three times) works, Cannon dies, and Kingsley makes a miraculous recovery. No one is the wiser but Dr. Sovac.
Before his surgically assisted death, Cannon revealed that his gang was after him because he hid half a million dollars of loot somewhere in New York City and didn't cut them in on it. Sovac hatches a wild plan. If he can somehow bring out the dormant aspects of Cannon's personality in Kingsley's hybrid brain, he can find out where the money is hidden, steal it, and use it to fund his brain transplantation research. He lies about needing to attend a meeting in New York about some local hospital business and talks Kingsley into going with him and leaving Margaret at home. He says it will be good for Kingsley's convalescence and give Margaret a break. The mild-mannered Kingsley warms up to the idea after initially rejecting New York as too loud and noisy. He likes to read, teach, and study English lit away from the hubbub of city life, but he decides New York may be just what he needs after all.
Once in Manhattan, Cannon's old memories start to come back to Kingsley, partially engineered by Sovac. After a shock to the system while attending Cannon's favorite nightclub, seeing a performance by the gangster's girlfriend, nightclub singer Sunny (Anne Nagel), and spotting a member of Cannon's former crew, Kingsley gets a pounding headache and extreme fatigue. Back at the hotel, he wakes up and is transformed into Cannon (complete with his gray hair turning dark, the only part of this science I have a hard time believing). Cannon takes the brain and body switcheroo pretty well, especially since he can no longer be recognized by the police or his former friends turned enemies. He starts bumping off his gang one by one, reconnecting with a mystified Sunny, and heading for a showdown with Marnay (though Lugosi and Karloff only share one scene and aren't even on screen at the same time in that one), while occasionally turning back into kindly old Kingsley. Events grow even more complicated, with Sovac cranking up his manipulations and Cannon/Kingsley's Jekyll and Hyde act making a mess of both men's lives.
He has less screen time than the other two men, but Lugosi acquits himself nicely playing a gangster. It's an unusual role for him, and he nails it. Lugosi is mostly remembered today for Dracula and his later declining years of addiction and financial struggles while appearing in the Ed Wood movies (which are much better than their reputation as kitschy trash) and Martin Landau's portrayal of him in this period in Tim Burton's movie Ed Wood, but I think he's still underrated as a physical performer. He finds a particular and distinct way of carrying himself and moving his body in each character he plays (even in his worst films), and the way he occupies the physical space as a gangster here is a Lugosi I'd never seen before.
Directed by jack-of-all-genres journeyman filmmaker Arthur Lubin, most famous for the Claude Rains Phantom of the Opera, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the Francis the talking mule movies (though my non-Black Friday favorite is Rhubarb, a screwball comedy about an orange cat named Rhubarb who inherits a professional baseball team and a sizable fortune after his eccentric millionaire owner dies), Black Friday was one of six feature films Lubin directed in 1940 (the Hollywood studio system work schedule was beyond insane). The other five included two mysteries, a gangster movie, a crime thriller, and a musical. Black Friday has all of that (yes, even a musical number) plus some mad scientist horror. The disparate elements work on their own and as part of the whole. I haven't seen anything quite like it, I had a great time watching it, and I recommend it to fans of Karloff, Lugosi, '40s noir, and the Jekyll and Hyde story.
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