Black Market Babies

Four years before Dennis O’Keefe played a journalist busting up a baby selling racket in Joseph M. Newman’s Abandoned (1949), low-budget studio Monogram released a cheaper, grittier, more primitive variation on the illegal baby theme with William Beaudine’s unmistakably titled Black Market Babies. Despite a few underwhelming supporting performances, the film stars Monogram regular Kane Richmond, whose cockiness and charm serve him well here as extremely scummy gangster Eddie Condon, who’s recently started looking for his next moneymaking venture. After overhearing a conversation between doctors, Condon has a bold idea: teaming up with his pal Anthony Marsden (George Meeker), he recruits a sad, alcoholic doctor, Henry Jordon (Ralph Morgan), to deliver accidental and unwanted babies and sell them to adoptive parents at a huge profit. Jayne Hazard plays Condon’s wife Doris (when asked what her husband does for a living, she replies, “Eddy never talks about it and I don’t ask any questions”), whose pregnant sister Evelyn (Teala Loring) is low on cash and needs to rely on Dr. Jordon for delivery: this situation sets up one of the cruelest and most cynical lies told in all of noir. Beaudine reserves most of his noir style for the early scenes of a home invasion and back alley gunfight in a rainstorm, and Kay’s score is surprisingly sophisticated for such a low-budget film, emotional tension drawn out with, in several parts, a single piano key pressed slowly and repeatedly, one beat per measure.