Abandoned (Universal-International, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 4) I watched a quite good film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” show, hosted by Eddie Muller: Abandoned, a 1949 Universal-International production by director Joseph H. Newman based on a script by Irwin Gielgud (presumably no relation to John) with “additional dialogue” by William Bowers. Eddie Muller’s intro recalled that he showed the film to director Newman, who hadn’t seen it since he signed off on his final cut in 1949, and Newman credited Bowers with the mordant wisecracks that add a great deal to this film’s appeal. The one line from the film quoted on its imdb.com page was one from Kerric (Raymond Burr), chief enforcer to the illegal adoption agency run by heavy-set apparent do-gooder Mrs. Donner (Marjorie Rambeau), who expressed his discontent with his current line of work by saying, “I was just thinking how nice life used to be when I stuck to blackmail and petty larceny.” That’s almost certainly a William Bowers line! In Muller’s outro he said that the story of Abandoned was based on a real-life case from Memphis, Tennessee, in which a woman named Georgia Tann from Philadelphia, Mississippi who’d trained as a social worker grabbed control of the Shelby County branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and ultimately gained control of the entire state’s organization. She started trafficking illegitimate children as early as 1924 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Tann) and she had powerful friends in high places that protected her, including long-time Memphis Mayor, U.S. Congressmember and political boss Edward Hall “Boss” Crump (a footnote in blues history since W. C. Handy wrote the original version of his first hit, “Memphis Blues,” as a campaign song for Crump in 1910) and Shelby County Family Court Judge Camille Kelley.

Though it wasn’t until 1950, one year after Abandoned was filmed, that formal legal charges were brought against the Tennessee Children’s Home Society – and Tann herself died of uterine cancer in 1950 just before she was about to be indicted – the story had begun to come to light as early as 1947. Among the celebrity couples who used Tann’s services to obtain black-market babies were Joan Crawford and her third husband, Phillip Terry; and Dick Powell and his second wife, June Allyson. (At the time it was common for female stars who wanted children to adopt because they didn’t want to have to take the months off their careers to have children au naturel. In her autobiography, Ingrid Bergman recalled how startled other women in Hollywood were when they realized her daughter Pia was her natural offspring.) Abandoned begins with a young woman named Paula Considine (Gale Storm, turning in a surprisingly good dramatic performance from someone primarily identified as a comedienne) showing up at the Los Angeles Police Department to find out what happened to her sister Mary. This was in the days when the Police Department operated out of the Los Angeles City Hall instead of having a building of their own. Paula meets reporter Mark Sitko (Dennis O’Keefe) outside the building and he notices that she’s being followed by Kerric (Raymond Burr), whom Mark recognizes as a corrupt private detective. It seems that Mary’s and Paula’s parents hired Kerric to find Mary, who’d disappeared in L.A. (though the film is prefaced by a narration that assures us the story could be happening anywhere, there are all too many familiar L.A. locations to allow this story to seem universal) after conceiving a baby out of wedlock. (We never learn just how this happened or who the father was; in Muller’s narration he claimed that Gielgud’s original script had made it clear that Mary’s own father had molested her and the baby was therefore the product of incest, but the Production Code Administration vetoed that plot twist in a hurry.)

Eventually Mark and Paula learn that Mary is dead, victim of carbon monoxide poisoning; the cops have officially ruled it suicide, but Paula insists her sister wouldn’t have killed herself and she’s convinced Mary was murdered. The film cuts back and forth between Our Heroes and the bad guys: human trafficking queen Mrs. Donner (Marjorie Rambeau); Decola (Will Kuluva); Hoppe (Mike Mazurki from Murder, My Sweet), the gang’s muscle; and Harry (David Clarke). Kerric gradually realizes the rest of the gang considers him expendable, and he’s in a panic to get together enough money to flee to another city and presumably get out of their reach. In the years before Raymond Burr got the role of Perry Mason in the long-running TV series based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s legal-procedural novels, he played an awful lot of slimy villains, but this one really takes the cake: he doesn’t care whom he double-crosses or how as long as he gets whatever he wants and escapes the gang’s reach. There’s a surprisingly violent scene for a Code-era movie between Kerric and Hoppe in which we get to see how relatively short Mike Mazurki really was (he was six-foot-three and for his classic role as ex-wrestler Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet – my choice for the greatest film noir ever – they had to put him on risers or build the sets asymmetrically so he would loom over Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe even though Powell was only three inches shorter; this time he was only about a head taller than Raymond Burr). Mark and Paula hook up with the local district attorney’s office in the person of McRae (Jeff Chandler, whom I didn’t recognize at first because he still had dark hair; he hadn’t gone prematurely grey yet, though I recognized him from his voice), who’s been aware that there was a ring trafficking babies in L.A. but hadn’t got the evidence he needed to bust them. Mark and Paula continue their own investigation while also cooperating with McRae, and they find out where Mary was staying while she had her baby.

One of Mary’s roommates was Dottie Jensen (Meg Randall, who gives a marvelous performance that should have marked her for biggers and betters), who hasn’t given birth yet and who’s in the hospital where Mary had been. Dottie agrees to serve as a decoy for both the D.A.’s office and the police, and sure enough, Mrs. Donner approaches her with a gooey-sweet pitch, saying she’s from a “religious organization” and even offering her a pocket Bible. Then Mrs. Donner zooms in for the kill and offers Dottie the chance to move into a much nicer facility in which all her expenses will be paid and she’ll have better food and more comforts if only she’ll give up her baby once it’s born. Fortunately, the police have hidden microphones in place and record the whole conversation – on a disc recorder instead of wire or tape, which really dates this movie. Meanwhile Mark and Paula trace Mary’s baby to one of five adoptive parents from a list they get from McRae; the baby is in the hands of adoptive mother Mrs. Spence (Ruth Sanderson), a genuinely pathetic (in the good sense) woman who has no idea of “her” baby’s provenance and who understandably wants to keep the girl. Only Kerric, having failed to raise his getaway money any other way, hits on the idea of kidnapping Mary’s daughter and then selling her to Paula. He completes the deal, but the other members of the gang worm out of him where he stashed Paula and Mary’s baby. They kill him and then recover the kid, taking both her and Paula to the unfinished “Paradise Hills Country Club” development where they knocked off Mary in the first place. They plan to get rid of Paula and the baby in the same way, but fortunately Mark suggests to the police that they’ve probably taken Paula to the same place where they knocked off her sister Mary, and the good guys arrive just in time to revive Paula and save the baby, with the intimation that Mark and Paula (who have predictably fallen in love during the course of their investigation, and have already posed as a married couple looking to buy one of Mrs. Donner’s black-market babies) will get married and raise the child as their own.

Abandoned isn’t much of a film noir either visually (though there are some stunning noir-esque compositions from cinematographer William Daniels, who’d just graduated from his years as Greta Garbo’s favorite cameraman to shooting films noir for Universal-International, including 1948’s The Naked City, for which he won an Academy Award) or thematically (the good guys are all good and the bad guys are mostly all bad; Raymond Burr’s character is the only one with any emotional or moral complexity), but it’s a capable, compelling drama and well worth watching despite occasional bits of over-the-topness. It’s also unusually violent for a 1949 movie – the fight scene in which Mazurki kills Burr is especially graphic for a Code-era film and still packs a wallop today – and one could readily see a modern-day remake, especially now that the radical Right has stripped away women’s control of their own bodies and made having to bear an unwanted baby a live issue again.