Abandoned

There's often some dispute over what counts as a noir when you're on the edges of the genre. Some movies have decided noirish elements even if I think they're not quite noir. But I can see why other people might group them in with noir. Such is the case with one of Eddie Muller's Noir Alley choices from several months back, the 1949 crime/suspense movie Abandoned.

After some narration that would have been right at home in The Naked City a year earlier, we're introduced to one of the main characters. Paula Considine (Gale Storm) walks into a police station in Los Angeles looking for the Bureau of Missing Persons. She's arrived in the big city from a small town in Pennsylvania, after having gotten a letter from her big sister. Since then, radio silence from big sister. The man at the desk is about to finish up his shift for the night, so he suggests Paula fill out the form overnight and come back in the morning.

Meanwhile, a fairly nosy man shows up at the desk and starts chatting up Paula. That man is Mark Sitko (Dennis O'Keefe), a reporter for the Mirror. Sitko may have been looking for information on somebody else, but he knows a good story when he hears it, and having heard Paula's story, he suspects a good one here. Eventually they go to the morgue and, looking through the book of unidentified dead people there, Paula recognizes her sister's photo. The sister was found in a car in the garage of a building under construction, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, in what to the coroner seems like an obvious suicide. Except that Paula knows her sister didn't know how to drive, which to her suggests it's not a suicide.

Then, on the way out of the morgue, Mark is smart enough to realize that Paula is being tailed by a figure in the shadows. Mark comes up with a plan to get the man out of the shadows, and when that happens he recognizes the man as Kerric (Raymond Burr), a private investigator. He claims that he was working for Paula's father to try to find Paula's sister; once Paula left Pennsylvania her dad wanted Kerric to find her too. But of course all of this is several years before the premiere of Perry Mason on TV, so the presence of Raymond Burr in the cast likely means a bad guy.

Meanwhile, it's been revealed to us that the letter Paula received from her sister is on the letterhead of a hospital, and that the sister was pregnant and there to give birth. Mark thinks that there's something fishy going on, and that the sister may have gotten involved with what is not a reputable adoption agency. So they take the case to the district attorney (Jeff Chandler), who informs them that he's swamped, so they're going to have to do some investigating themselves.

As for Kerric, he goes to visit a Mrs. Donner (Marjorie Rambeau), and it's revealed that she's the woman involved with running the illegal adoption ring, paying the expenses of the unwed mothers and then selling off the babies to parents who can't wait to adopt through the normal channels. All of this is within the first 20 minutes or so of the movie, so there's not much mystery here. Instead, as Alfred Hitchcock would argue, it's suspense in that we know who the bad guys are and what they're doing, but will the reporter and sister be able to find out and get out of danger?

Abandoned was the sort of movie something between a B-movie and a programmer that Hollywood produced in the years after World War II; I've argued that MGM's equivalent tended to be the sort of films that paid for the Freed Unit to make all those musicals. This one, however, was made at Universal; that combined with definitely not being a prestige picture and not having the biggest stars goes a long way to explaining why it's not very well known today.

There are some obvious noir elements in the photography and the heavies that make it easy to understand why Eddie Muller would program it for Noir Alley. The fact that I consider it more of a crime/suspense movie than a noir doesn't mean I didn't like it, however. It's quite well done for a movie on a budget, with a fairly effective story and good characterizations, especially from Rambeau.

Abandoned is available on DVD from Universal's MOD scheme, and is definitely worth a watch.