By sheer luck reporter Dennis O'Keefe runs into Gale Storm in town looking for her sister and a baby she gave birth to. Sadly they find her in the morgue, but no trace of the infant. What O'Keefe does notice is a sleazy private eye played by Raymond Burr shadowing Storm.

That's the start of Abandoned a good noir film about a baby adoption racket where the queenpin is society matron Marjorie Rambeau. In a cast of some excellent character players she tops the list. Had this been an A and not a B film Rambeau might have been in Oscar contention, she's that good and that scary.

As for Burr he's really rather stupid and out of his league with Rambeau and her gang. It costs him big time.

Up and coming Jeff Chandler is 3rd billed playing the police chief and friend of O'Keefe. As he did in a few films for Universal Chandler also narrates. Will Kulava and Mike Mazurki play a pair of Rambeau's goons , Meg Randall plays a pregnant border at Rambeau's house and Jeanette Nolan is a socially conscious Salvation Army major.

A good B film from Universal which should be better known.

Gale Storm's sister was due to have a baby out of wedlock. Now she has disappeared, and there's no sign of the baby. She enlists reporter Dennis O'Keefe, and together they investigate what happened, and the baby-farming racket at the center of the mystery.

Here's a Universal noir directed by B specialist Joseph Newman. It's a bit hysterical in tone, but well put together, with William Daniels as the director of photography, and a sterling cast, including Jeff Chandler as O'Keefe's editor, Raymond Burr and Mike Mazurki as heavies, and Marjorie Rambeau as the sinister head of the ring. It's a bit dated, but very watchable.

If there's someone with dollar signs instead of pupils and evidence of a soul in their eyes, they can be bought, even within the medical community. The baby racket is an old plotline source that goes back to the silent era, but with a film noir touch to its theme, it becomes a different ballgame altogether. Gale Storm plays a young woman determined to find her sister, and what she turns up, along with reporter Dennis O'Keefe is something more sinister than just the proof her sister was murdered.

It's with the gift of a Bible that the calling card is made, through generous socialite Marjorie Rambeau who runs a private "charity" to find homes for the babies of unwed mothers. But her methods are sinister, even beyond the fact that these are illegal adoptions, even having a nurse planted in the hospital to ensure that the adopted mother's name is used on the birth certificate.

Raymond Burr as a private detective on Rambeau's payroll, Jeff Chandler as a cop pal of O'Keefe's, Meg Randall as an unwed mother to be, Jeanette Nolan as another cop and Mike Mazurki as (what else?) a criminal henchman are all decent. The best line comes from Burr who says that he misses the old days when he was just involved in blackmail. Unfortunately, there are several implausibilities that keep this from being fully believable even though the overly dramatic narration indicates that this could (and has) happened in any city. It's obvious that the unnamed city is Los Angeles, a predictible detail from a movie made just across the Hollywood freeway in Universal City.