The Great Brain Robbery

Oh, no, Boris! Please don't put part of that gangster's brain in your best friend's skull. After all, you have no idea where it has been.

Nevertheless, Boris Karloff insisted on doing just that in the 1940 movie Black Friday. At first, Boris Karloff's character -- Dr. Ernest Sovac -- was just concerned about saving the life of his best friend George Kingsley (played by Stanley Ridges), a kindly English professor who taught at the local college. Then Dr. Sovac discovered that the brain he used to fix his friend's injured grey matter belonged to gangster Red Cannon, the only man who knew where $500,000 in stolen loot has been hidden. Of course, Dr. Sovac did not want the money for himself but he was not exactly eager to turn it over to the authorities either. Instead Dr. Sovac tempted himself with the thought of all the lab equipment he could buy with that stolen loot. And so it went.

This being the Hays Code era, it does not really seem like much of a spoiler to note that Dr. Sovac's scheme did not exactly go off without a hitch. For one thing, he found that he was able to summon Red's personality into Professor Kingsley's body through hypnosis but he was not so good at controlling Red while he was in there. Moreover, Sovac and Cannon were not the only ones searching for the loot. The rest of Red's gang -- led by gangster Eric Mornay (played by Bela Lugosi, natch) -- were searching for it too and they could be every bit as brutal as Red too. Would Dr. Sovac be able to beat them to the dough? And if so, how long could he hold on to it?

Like most scientific horror films made in the 1930s and 1940s, much of the plot details seem almost laughable by today's standards. After all, the film would have you believe that Dr. Sovac managed to singlehandedly put off an operation on not just one but two human brains without arousing the suspicions of any outsiders. Not once did a nurse or orderly interfere or show up at the wrong time and of course, Dr. Sovac had no trouble keeping everything sterile and operating at the same time. Moreover, though Dr. Sovac was said to have transplanted part of a gangster's brain into Professor Kingsley's skull to replace brain matter that was too damaged to survive, there seemed little concern on his part about whether or not his friend's true personality would survive just an operation. Indeed, the possibility that Red Cannon's true self might live on in his best friend's brain came almost as a complete surprise to Dr. Sovac though I would think that the opposite result would be more unlikely.

In any event, the true purpose of this movie was not to tantalize viewers with the possibilities of future medical advances but to issue the same old warning about meddling with things man was not meant to mess with that we always seem to get from horror films of this era. However, for a change, Dr. Sovac seemed to worry more about the risks such an operation might pose to his medical license than the notion that he might be punished by a higher power. Then again, this being a Hays Code picture, he got enough punishment as it was.