What other movie does one watch on Black Friday but Black Friday? Co-starring the absolutely incomparable Boris Karloff (Frankenstein’s Monster) and Bela Lugosi (Dracula). The plot is interesting but at the same time not always that compelling. Boris and Bela never really interact which feels like a missed opportunity. This lackluster classic still holds value in its many solid actors and overall film quality but still won’t be a movie I return to anytime soon.
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We are being told the story through scientific notes handed off to a man who is viewing an execution. Boris Karloff plays Dr. Sovac in this film and is always sharply dressed and well groomed which is sort of unusual for his roles so it is nice to see! About five (5) minutes in and we are watching a man get hit by a car and I’m not entirely sure that it is fake? It didn’t look fake, is what I’m saying. Either way, the man hit by the car, George, is going to die so his best friend Dr. Sovac decides to perform a brain transplant on him with the gangster who was driving the vehicle that hit him. This is all just writing in Sovac’s notes. He says that he has done the brain transplant successfully on animals, what animal he does not specify. Actually, he gives absolutely no further detail about his previous experiments with brain transplantation but I was at the edge of my seat. What animals, Dr. Sovac? And then, yeah, Sovac just puts the gangster's brain (because of course it wasn’t a normal brain (an Abbie Normal brain)) into his best friend’s brain, because why wouldn’t he? Absolutely wild. It looks like this time Karloff is the crazy doctor instead of Lugosi (the roles were reversed in The Raven 1935). George miraculously survives the procedure (the gangster dies, but no one mourns him) but he is different. George’s wife notices that he is more irritable and otherwise is just not acting like himself. Sovac has resolved that, since George is showing so many of the gangster, Red Cannon’s, tendencies, Sovac would take George back to Red Cannon’s old hang outs to see if it sparked any memories about where the gangster hid his fat stack o’ cash. The not-so-good doctor has decided that the stolen money would be better served to help him build his own private laboratory where he could perform even more experiments.
When George was told Sovac wanted George to accompany him to New York, he was hesitant but then George asked, “As my doctor, do you prescribe it?” And Sovac slyly responded, “As your doctor, I insist on it.” When they arrived at the hotel that Red Cannon used to haunt, George immediately asked the desk clerk for specific rooms even though they have never been there before and then guided them to said rooms. Sovac seems genuinely disturbed at George for knowing so many things that Red Cannon would know even though that was the whole point of this experiment! George is uncharacteristically ready for a night out, he says, “Let’s, uh, ‘Do The Town.’ You know what I mean!” And of course Sovac takes them to a club Red Cannon frequented. Red’s old flame Sunny was performing at the tavern and watching her gave me flashbacks to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, especially the 1920 version where Miss Gina was barely dancing on stage (Sunny was at least singing here). George sees someone Red recognizes and it gives him a terrible headache to which Sovac immediately takes him out of that situation and I said to myself, “Oh, what a good friend!” No, he is not a good friend! He is using his friend, the one who he experimented on, without his consent, and who he is now using his altered brain to try and cash out! Wack! Crazy! Awful! Bad friend! Bad, bad friend! “With friends like these who needs enemies.”
They go back to the hotel but the headaches persist. Sovac’s “friend” George holds his head in agony and then quite literally becomes Red Cannon. In the flesh! But it also isn’t. Throughout the movie he is recognized as George, then is recognized as someone different than George, but is also recognized as someone different than Red Cannon… But the whole movie he is played by the man they cast as Red Cannon and they call him Red Cannon… Huh? Red has some questions and Sovac tries to calmly answer them (as though the procedure Sovac did was to save Red’s life and not George’s), “You were smashed up in an accident, you remember? So I had to operate to give you another body.” To which Red hilariously responds, “You had to do what?” After that Red goes out a murderin’ and a stranglin’ and George comes back in his bed, asleep, with literal blood on his hands. Sovac only NOW wonders to himself if he has crossed a line (you can see it in his eyes). We meet Bela Lugosi (Marnay) and his gang, they were in tight with Red before they crossed him and ran him off the road in the beginning of the movie resulting in the crash yadda, yadda, yadda, here we are. Red goes to visit Sunny, she doesn’t think it is him because he doesn’t look like Red but he acts just like Red so she does believe it's really him. Red waits around for Marnay but the police come and he shoots them and runs away in a sort of silly chase scene. Sunny tells Marnay that Red was at her place and that he is alive which Marnay finds hard to believe but the evidence is strong and they want his hidden money. Sovac’s daughter and George’s wife both come to the hotel to check on their respective men and neither are happy by what they find. “I’m not a scientist, Father. I can only see you destroying your best friend.”
George’s wife wants to take George home which is a big problem. Sovac lets slip to Red that he knows about the money but then basically holds him hostage since Red is in George’s body and can slip back into George if he falls unconscious. Sovac tells the girls everything will be fine. Red goes to Sunny to tell her they are going to be leaving soon but she runs right off to Marnay and the gang to tell them Red is getting the money. They follow him and tussle for the dough. Marnay ends up with the money but Red knows right where he is going with it and follows Marnay to Sunny’s apartment. Once inside Red immediately found Marnay in the closet, locked him inside, and strangled Sunny to death for her disloyalty. Grabbing a taxi to the airport and with his money in his lap, Red fell asleep in the back of the cab and woke up as George. George asked to be taken back to the hotel, paid his cabbie, and in the morning the police called George in because he had paid the taxi driver a stolen 1,000 dollar bill! Luckily he had been Red Cannon at the time the cabbie looked at him so he didn’t look like George and the driver didn’t recognize him as he was now (if that makes sense). They all went home where George didn’t have any flare ups of Red because nothing triggered Red to come out.
Back in his classroom, George was teaching a lecture, when a nearby siren triggered the Red Cannon in him to come out and he immediately went for Sovac but got to his daughter first. He was strangling her to death (his signature move) when Sovac shot Red, but also his own friend, to death. Red faded back into George and asked why Sovac had done it. Our movie ends as it began, Sovac silently accepting the death penalty for his crime.
"Jane, did you ever stop to think that... if anything happened to me, I mean anything bad, there wouldn't be any money for you? I wouldn't be here to sign the checks. You wouldn't even have pocket money. Did you ever think of that?"
Canadian actor Jack Carson and his partner Dave Willock were belonged to the "light comedy" tradition.
Jack Carson was raised in the farming community of Carman, Manitoba. He was eleven years old when he won first prize at the Manitoba Provincial School Drama Competition for his performance in a play called My Manitoba Home.
The second runner up was Dave Willock, an American actor who grew up outside Winnipeg.
Willock and Carson partnered for a comedy act which they performed during the dying days of vaudeville. They were billed as “Something New in Comedy.” The duo performed a mock newsreel which featured them doing impressions of Mussolini, Gandhi, Laurel and Hardy, and John D. Rockefeller.
Jack Carson went on to be a Warner Brothers movie star while Willock became a character actor featured in many sitcoms.
David Willock (August 13, 1909 – November 12, 1990) Film and television character actor. He appeared in 181 films and television series from 1939 to 1979.
In the 1961–1962 season, he played Harvey Clayton, father of the 1920s teenager Margie Clayton, portrayed by Cynthia Pepper in ABC's Margie. He appeared on an episode of Dragnet as an ex-vaudevillean who is cheated out of $9,000 that he found on a sidewalk. He appeared in two episodes of The Cara Williams Show with Cara Williams in 1964 and 1965 and played seven different characters on CBS's Green Acres with Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor, mostly portraying clerks or elevator operators.
Willock did voice acting for animated series, such as the offscreen narrator on Wacky Races (1968) and as father Augustus "Gus" Holiday on The Roman Holidays (1972). Willock appeared in a classic 1970 television commercial for "The Great American Soups", directed by American satirist Stan Freberg, alongside tap-dancing star Ann Miller. (Wikipedia)
