MovieChat Forums > Black Friday (1940) Discussion > Not so easy to suspend my disbelief

Not so easy to suspend my disbelief

posted 15 years ago by wwkentucky
3 replies | jump to latest

I usually swallow far-fetched plot devices and storylines hook, line, and sinker --- for instance, I LIKED how Stanley Ridges’ hair kept miraculously changing colors in “Black Friday” (1940) --- but there are two other plot points in this film that I have problems with.

1. The operation. The voiceover has just finished telling us that it’s an illegal operation, yet Sovac (Karloff) performs it in a hospital w/o being caught. We see that the hospital is staffed with other doctors and nurses, but we’re expected to believe that none of these medical professionals questions much less NOTICES Sovac taking these patients into the operating room???? And that’s right, he took not one, but TWO patients into the operating room. Also --- apparently Sovac is such a skilled surgeon that he required no assistance during the operation.

2. The gangster’s brain in the body of the absent-minded professor, and the professor’s brain is thrown out w/ yesterday’s paper. Yet, the patient retains the memories of both men. How could the gangster's brain possibly absorb Kingsley’s knowledge of English literature?!?!?

[–] Doghouse-6 14 years ago

Not that it makes it any more plausible, but Sovac explains that he used tissue from Cannon's brain to replace the damaged portions of Kingley's, rather than replace the whole brain (and nothing but the brain).

It's too bad they thought audiences needed the exaggerated change in appearance (the hair color and so forth) to tell who was whom and when. Stanley Ridges was an excellent and versatile actor, and he could - and did - play virtually everything during his somewhat truncated film career, and would have gotten the point across quite admirably without makeup/hair effects.

Oddly, Karloff made a film in the UK four years earlier called THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND, which featured one man housing multiple consciousnesses, and it was handled in a much more sophisticated manner, with the actor - Frank Cellier (a fabulous performance) - communicating it all on his own without any appearance alterations.

Karloff himself had a similar challenge in THE BLACK ROOM the year before that, in which he plays an evil twin who murders his goody-two-shoes brother and assumes his identity. He conveys the idea of the bad twin masquerading as the good one with effective subtlety.

I'm done now.

Poe! You are...avenged!

[–] tgemberl 9 years ago

I didn't notice the difference in appearance. I was impressed by how well Ridges played both roles, which were so different. Clearly quite an actor.

"Extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no vice."

[–] Doghouse-6 9 years ago

Saw him again just the other night in To Be Or Not To Be (in which he had a featured role as Siletsky). Black Friday was one of his showiest opportunities; some of his roles consisted of no more than a few lines of dialogue, but he did parts of all sizes and types.

I'd wager that audiences of the '30s and '40s might even have seen him back to back in a double feature, and never realized they were seeing the same actor.

Poe! You are...avenged!