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Date Posted: 08:54:54 11/21/09 Sat
Author: DAN
Subject: Black Friday

"Black Friday is good Universal B movie that moves along quite nicely.
And it can be viewed as both a Sci-Fi/Horror, and also as a crime film.

When I was younger I used to wish that Lugosi could have played the Dr Sovac part and Karloff played the Red Cannon George Kingsley part.

But watching it now I can see it probably wouldn't have worked out as well with Karloff because Stanley Ridges did an excellent job as Cannon/Kingsley.
One regret I still have is that Karloff and Lugosi didn't appear together in any scenes.

This is also Anne Gwynne's first major role in a Universal Horror film as Boris Karloff's daughter, Jean Sovac and does a nice job as usual. Anne Nagel plays Cannon's girlfriend and she is good here too.

I watched BF last night with my cousin and his wife, and after it was over we got into a little debate about Boris Karloff's character, Dr Sovac being excuted, and was it justified, or wrong? My cousin's wife said it was totally wrong. So I came up with this theory.

In my opinion from what us, the viewers know about Dr Sovac, you can see he is another one of those scientists that will go to almost any means to accomplish his goals.

We can see that Sovac's main interest was getting Red Cannon's money, no matter what his friend, Prof Kingsley had to endure.

Sovac brought Kingsley to NYC to bring out the Cannon brain, and after Cannon came out, it didn't really matter to Sovac who Cannon killed, Sovac's only concern was the fact that Cannon might get killed himself before the money was recovered. So maybe Dr Sovac did deserve the chair?

However, if this was a real life situation, Sovac should not have been executed because there would have been very little evidence to convict him.

After the money was recovered and Cannon reverted back to Prof Kingsley and resumed teaching, nobody was any the wiser about any of the criminal activities that happened in NYC involving them.
All anyone thought was Sovac was helping Kingsley to recover.

When Kingsley became Cannon again after hearing police sirens in the classroom, he went to see Dr Sovac at his home and tried to kill Sovac's daughter Jean. When Sovac sees this he kills Cannon, which would be justifiable homicide, and all charges would be dropped.

But of course in the film Dr. Sovac was guilty, and by the movie codes back then, any character who murders someone was usually put to death in the electric chair, or killed before he faced the law.

Anyway my cousin and me have been having debates like this ever since we were teenagers.

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Replies:

[> Re: Black Friday -- Tim, 03:18:27 11/23/09 Mon [1]

You raise some intriguing points, Dan, and I tend to agree with your conclusions.

I was also disappointed that Karloff and Lugosi didn't have any scenes together in the picture. Lugosi was originally supposed to play one of the two principal parts, but instead was relegated to the gangster role of Marnay. Still, he made the most of the part, and the sequence with him locked in a closet remains one of the best-known sections of the film.

Stanley Ridges did a really great job as the soft-spoken Professor Kingsley and the tough Red Cannon. His scholarly Kingsley character seems older than either Dr Sovac or Marnay, although in fact Ridges was a little younger than Karloff and Lugosi.

Many of Dr Sovac's actions are motivated by greed, so he probably deserved to pay a price for his crimes. However, it may have been difficult to prove his guilt, as your post suggests.

Black Friday may be one of Universal's "B" pictures, but its cast is "A" grade excellent. The studio knew the names Karloff and Lugosi would bring in the crowds.

Tim


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