Revisiting 1940’s ‘Black Friday,’ Bela Lugosi & Boris Karloff’s Final Pairing in a Universal Horror Movie
If you need a break from this August heat, Svengoolie will be showing something quite chilling on the Saturday, Aug. 24, 2024, installment of his MeTV series, Svengoolie Classic Horror & Sci-Fi Movie: the 1940 sci-fi terror fest Black Friday, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
Originally titled Friday the 13th, the film follows Professor George Kingsley (Stanley Ridges), who gets run down by a gangster on the lam. The only way Dr. Ernie Sovac (Boris Karloff) can save him is to transplant part of the deceased gangster’s brain into Kingsley’s head. Chaos ensues, with the professor and gangster fighting for control of the same body, while the (slightly mad) scientist hunts for money that the dead gangster hid during his lifetime.
But the backstory on this neat sci-fi and noir spin on the Jekyll and Hyde tale is fascinating, too. Hypnosis might have played a role in the film’s production, Karloff switched around the roles, and the film’s director came to great fame later in his career by horsing around.
It’s One of Eight Movies Karloff and Lugosi Made Together (But This One Is Different From the Rest)
Everett Collection
Horror titans Karloff and Lugosi made eight movies together between 1934’s The Black Cat — a Universal classic where Karloff and Lugosi go tete-a-tete as, respectively, a mad Satanic architect who keeps women trapped in his basement, and a recently-released prisoner of war hellbent on stopping him —and 1945’s The Body Snatcher.
But in Black Friday, their sixth costarring feature, the two legends don’t go at each other; while Karloff has a primary role, Lugosi shows up in a much smaller part as one of Red Cannon’s gangster rivals. This is one of only two films where they don’t share screen time — the other is the 1934 entertainment industry comedy The Gift of Gab, in which they both have small cameos. Black Friday was also their final Universal film together.
Boris Karloff Demoted Himself From the Lead Role
Everett Collection
Though Karloff gets a decent amount of screen time, the dual role of Professor Kingsley and Red Cannon is undoubtedly the lead. Stanley Ridges, who was best known for his stage work, does a wonderful job with the role — but doesn’t it kind of feel like a role that was written for Karloff?
That’s because it was. Screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who also wrote horror classics like The Wolf Man and House of Frankenstein, created the brain-snatched professor role for his friend Karloff. But after presenting Karloff with the script, Siodmak recalled, “He thought he wasn’t a good enough actor for the lead and took a secondary part, suggesting Stanley Ridges, a very good stage actor to play the part.”
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Real-Life Hypnotism Was Part of the Ad Campaign
Bela Lugosi and Anne Nagel in Black Friday Courtesy Everett Collection
A trailer released to promote the film opens not by promoting its plot, or even the Karloff/Lugosi pairing. Instead, it hypes the supposed hypnotism that Lugosi underwent to make his death scene more realistic. A January 1940 article in the San Bernardino County Sun newspaper headlined “Bela Lugosi Put In Cataleptic Trance By Manly P. Hall; Realism Gained,” proclaimed Lugosi the first actor to perform while hypnotized, and claimed that director Arthur Lubin called in the hypnotist after days of trying and failing to get a realistic death scene out of Lugosi. After the hypnotist? “I don’t believe a man ever before has died so horribly on the screen.”
So was Lugosi actually hypnotized? Probably not; it was likely just an ad campaign to drum up excitement among viewers (and perhaps compensate for the fact that Lugosi has a relatively brief presence in the film).
The Director Went on to Direct One of Comedy’s Most Famous Duos (and Comedy’s Most Famous Horse)
Before The Black Cat, director Arthur Lubin had worked as a bit of a jack of all trades, directing dramas, Westerns, and mysteries for a variety of studios. The Black Cat was his first truly high profile gig, but it was followed a year later by the collaboration that would make his career: Lubin directed Abbott and Costello’s first feature, 1941’s Buck Privates.
The movie was an enormous hit, and Lubin went on to direct the pair’s next four films, including In The Navy. Variety dubbed him the most commercially successful director of 1941.
Lubin’s career had a number of hits and misses in the following decade, including the 1943 Phantom of the Opera with Claude Rains. But he struck gold in 1950 again, when he released Francis, the first film featuring Francis the Talking Mule. He directed five Francis movies, including 1955’s Francis in the Navy, a film which gave Clint Eastwood his first on-screen credit.
But Francis was merely a warm-up for Lubin’s greatest animal comedy success. Unable to secure the rights to make a Francis the Talking Mule TV spin-off show, Lubin did the next best thing and optioned the rights to a book about a talking horse (of course, of course). His TV show, Mr. Ed, did not find any network takers at first, so Lubin opted for the unusual arrangement of selling syndication rights to the first 26 episodes, which financed production of the show’s first season. In the second season, it was picked up by CBS, where it ran for over 100 episodes, kicking off a whole new era of shows about animal-human friendships that included Flipper and Gentle Ben.
Svengoolie will air Black Friday Saturday, Aug. 24, 2024, on MeTV at 8pm ET.
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