Black Friday (1940)
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated 6.3 by 1857 cinematizens.
Genre: Horror.
Verdict: Moments.
In upstate New York mild mannered, absent-minded Emeritus Professor jaywalks and gets badly clonked by a speeding car carrying a mortally wounded Gangster. Prof and Gangster ride together to the hospital in the same ambulance.
In the OR Dr Boris Karloff prepares needles and knives. (Pssst, at this point it helps to know that the screenplay was by Curt, Kurt, and Curtis Siodmak.) Borrie sees that Prof is toast while Gangster has a chance. This is the opportunity Borrie has been waiting for to prove his theories about …. brain transplants. Yep. By the science of scriptwriting Borrie digs out Prof’s grey cells and mashes them into the Gangster cranium along with the rest of the plumbing.
Several questions arise. Pay attention.
Did Borrie transplant all of Prof’s brain or just some Free Cells? What did he do with the Gangster’s brain already in residence? Does the answer to the latter question explain dinner?
The transformation of the bumbling Prof into the sneering, murderous dean, ah oops, gangster is to behold. There is an internal war for his soul within this man with two brains when Prof puts his head in his hands in anguish, and then recovers himself as Gangster. It is remarkable transition scene. One of the best this jaded hack has ever seen. Regrettably it is marred by the director’s decision to change slightly Prof/Gangster hair colour and the disappearing (and later reappearing) pince-nez glasses. Those distractions are distracting, and quite unnecessary to the tour de force acting at this point by the Stanley Ridges.
A Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde conflict follows. Borrie connives to bring out Gangster in Prof to lead him to the loot of the last heist, dreaming of using this ill-gotten nationally competitive research grant moolah to further his research into brain transplants for other movies. The matter is urgent because there are so many idiots around. See, nothing has ever changed.
There are complications from a wife and a daughter who get all moral.
There is a convoluted twist at the end, which is where the picture started with Borrie getting a chair endowed with electricity.
The end.
Siodmak returned to the brain transplant theme in his later work, some of which is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
The gossip is that Bela Lugosi was cast as the brain doctor with Karloff to play the split personality professor, but frictions among director Arthur Rubin and the two actors led to a last minute switch that put Lugosi in a minor role as a thug (and thereby totally wasted), made Karloff the doctor, and brought in journeyman Ridges as Prof. In the end it paid off with Ridges’s marvellous transitions.