TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Joseph M. Newman’s Abandoned (1949), with Dennis O’Keefe, Gale Storm, Jeff Chandler, Raymond Burr, Marjorie Rambeau, Will Kukuva and Mike Mazurki

By David in TN
friday, november 3, 2023 at 8:01:00 p.m. edt

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Joseph M. Newman’s Abandoned (1949), with Dennis O’Keefe, Gale Storm, Jeff Chandler, Raymond Burr, Marjorie Rambeau, Will Kukuva and Mike Mazurki.

Film Noir Guide: “A small-town Pennsylvania girl (Storm) arrives in Los Angeles looking for her missing sister, who recently had an illegitimate baby (did that really happen in 1949?). Unfortunately, the sister turns up in the morgue and the baby disappeared.”

“Storm and newspaper reporter O’Keefe, teamed up to find the killers, stumble across an infant-for-sale gang led by a pair of evil baby brokers (Rambeau and Kuluva). The amateur detectives turn over the information they have collected to a sympathetic cop (Chandler) who initiates a sting operation, using as bait a pregnant girl from a Salvation Army home and O’Keefe and Storm as potential adopters.”

“Burr is terrific as usual, this time playing a shady but nervous P.I. (‘I’d have been just as happy if we committed our murders in a state that doesn’t have capital punishment’). There’s only a little action, notably when Kuluva’s goon (noir veteran Mazurki) takes on Burr, but it’s still a fast-moving crime drama.”

David in TN: Last week’s Experiment in Terror was good, though overlong. Lee Remick (1935-1991) was a versatile actress who played a nice-girl bank teller this time. When Marilyn Monroe was fired from Something’s Got to Give in 1962, Remick was to replace her, as Monroe’s clothes fit her. Monroe was rehired on Dean Martin’s insistence, but OD’d in August, 1962. In 1967, Bobby Kennedy went on a tour of Europe and supposedly met up with Lee Remick for a tryst in a Paris hotel.

In his outro, Eddie Muller regretted not having Lee Remick on before and asked his facebook and twitter followers if they would like to see Anatomy of a Murder (1959) on Noir Alley.

N.S.: Why hasn’t Red Eddie shown Anatomy before? Because it’s too good a picture (it’s a masterpiece)? Because its star, Jimmy Stewart, was an anti-communist and a patriot? It’s a very liberal picture, what with Otto Preminger having produced and directed it, and Preminger having hired Duke Ellington to do the music and basically play himself (as a hotel bandleader), and Joseph Welch to play the judge (which he did a bang-up job at, by the way). I suspect that this movie is why my late mom always referred to Welch as “Judge Welch,” whenever she quoted his shameless attack on one of America’s greatest patriots, Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Joe Welch was never a judge.