Review of Black Friday

For those expecting a true Karloff/Lugosi collaboration, this will be a major disappointment. The two share no scenes together in this movie, and Lugosi's role as the gangster Eric Mornay is very limited - really not much more than an extended cameo. The movie really revolves around the friendship between Dr. Ernest Sovac (Karloff) and Professor George Kingsley (Stanley Ridges). Opening with Sovac about to be put to death in the electric chair, virtually the entire movie is a flashback which seeks to explain how he got into this situation. To boil it down to a couple of sentences, Kingsley is badly injured in an automobile accident, and to save his life Sovac performs an experimental brain "transplantation," putting the brain of gangster Red Cannon (also played by Ridges) into his body. Kingsley starts to take on more and more of Cannon's characteristics, and eventually even begins to physically transform into Cannon. Sovac, meanwhile, decides to exploit the situation to try to discover if, with his new brain, Kingsley might have knowledge of where Cannon hid $500,000.

To be honest, I thought this was one of the weaker movies that either Karloff or Lugosi were involved in (at least until some of the sad movies both were reduced to at the ends of their respective careers.) Lugosi's role, as I said, wasn't that important and Karloff struggled valiantly against a weak story but didn't convince me. Ironically for what Universal obviously tried to sell as another Karloff/Lugosi movie, Ridges came off looking best in this, but his reasonably good performance couldn't save a bizarre and unbelievable story that never really managed to capture my interest from the moment it started. Generously - 2/10