BLACK FRIDAY-This is the last of the Universal Pictures "team up" of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. It's more a crime revenge drama with horror overtones. Dr. Ernest Sovac (Karloff) faces death by electric chair. Before he goes he gives his notebook to a news reporter (James Craig) and we learn through flashbacks how Sovac became a murderer.
When his good friend Prof. George Kingsley (Stanley Ridges) is involved in a near fatal car accident, Sovac uses a secret, illegal brain transplant to save him. Unfortunately, Sovac uses the brain of a violent gangster Red Cannon (also Ridges). Everything goes well but when Sovac learns that Cannon stashed away half a million dollars he's anxious to get his hands on it so he can "continue my research". He takes Kingsley to NYC hoping familiar surrounding will jog his memory (they even stay in Cannon's old hotel room). The two go to a nightclub where Cannon's former lover Sunny (Anne Nagel) sings. They also run across Cannon's old gang members now led by Marley (Bela Lugosi). They are also looking for the hidden loot. Eventually, the Cannon persona gets out of control and starts killing in revenge but reverts back to Kingsley just in time before the police arrive. He and Sovac return to their sleepy town and seem to live fairly normally till a siren brings the Cannon personality back. He attacks Sovac's daughter (Anne Gwynne) and Sovac is forced to shoot him (he reverts back to Kingsley and dies).
BLACK FRIDAY is often ran down by detractors as not being a horror film but the real thing wrong with it seems to be that while Lugosi does get second billing, he's hardy in it at all (and badly miscast). He doesn't even have any scenes with Karloff! It's said Karloff (who smokes a lot!) was originally cast in the Kingsley role with Lugosi as his friend Sovac but his version of the Red Cannon gangster wasn't effective enough so Karloff was given the Sovac role and character actor Sidney Ridges replaced Karloff and he makes the most of the role giving quite a performance first as the timid bookish Kingsley and then as the ruthless revenge bound killer Cannon. (Some Jack P. Pierce make-up helps though). Lugosi was given the only other male role of any substance, that of Cannon's former second in command.
Director Arthur Lubin would make BUCK PRIVATES with Abbott and Costello the next year and go on to make many of the team's most famous movies (and many of the FRANCIS THE TALKING MULE series) Co-screenwriter Curt Siodmak would write the similar theme novel "Donovan's Brain" in 1942 and would work on many of the Universal horror film s of the '40's.
BLACK FRIDAY is fairly well done if improbable little story of which the only real failing is Lugosi wasted in a minor role.
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