When Karloff’s friend, an unassuming English professor (Stanley Ridges), is struck by a getaway car, Karloff secretly arranges to perform a brain transplant between his friend and the gangster in the getaway car (also Stanley Ridges), in an effort to save the professor’s life. Unfortunately, since this is a Universal thriller, the professor, who survives the operation, now has the gangster buried within him, and at the sound of a siren will switch personalities.
Here’s where Karloff’s greed comes in: he finds out the gangster has stashed some money somewhere and uses his professor friend’s “personality-switching” problem to his own advantage, taking the poor sap to New York to hunt the money down. The whole time, the professor is none the wiser and has no idea what he gets up to when he switches into the gangster persona, who has a score to settle with his old gang, including Bela Lugosi (bet you forgot about him) who’s also looking for the hidden money.
So the weird thing about this movie is I feel like the premise is backwards – it seems like if you took the gangster’s brain and put it into the professor’s body, it’d just be the gangster in the professor’s body. If you want this plot to work, you have to put the professor’s brain in the gangster’s body, and then it’s usually the professor but then the body does weird gangster-y stuff against his will.
Check this out: I didn’t even realize Stanley Ridges was playing both the gangster and the professor. I thought they were two different actors, and they’d switch out depending on which personality was coming through, or what the other characters in the scene were seeing. So either I’m super unobservant or Stanley Ridges did a killer job. It’s probably somewhere in between.
No comments:
Post a Comment