Babies for Sale (1940) User Reviews

Lack of frankness

[bkoganbing · 5/10 · 1 May 2013]

Ironically Babies For Sale had some potential of being a fairly good feature. Only the skill and likability of the cast keep this film at an average level. Nobody's fault really, the Code made it impossible to make a decent feature film on a very touchy topic.

The film is about the black market baby adoption racket where reporter Glenn Ford writes a story that there is one. Which brings out all the charities that deal with adoptions, the good and bad who succeed in getting Ford fired. Ford does not give up and starts his own investigation with the help of some concerned friends, including a few he makes along the way.

The Code had every one of the women in the home in question either a widow or one who was married, but the husband split, everything but actual unwed mothers. That had to be because the Code would not have an unwed mother shown to be of good character. Of course abortion was not even hinted at, but you can bet that the villain of the piece would have been doing that as well as he was making money every which way in his home for pregnant women.

The best thing this film has going for it is the portrayal of Miles Mander and his nurse Ratched assistant Georgia Caine as the ones who run the adoption racket from the home for pregnant women they run. Mander is one elegant slimeball, he charges the women a fee to give up their kids when they enter, keeps them as slaves practically while there, collects on the other end from prospective adoptive parents. I don't doubt he would have done illegal abortions without too much care for the life of the mothers and in 1940 abortion was strictly illegal.

Two things unravel his racket. The first is when he passes off what is described and you have to read between the lines as Down's Syndrome kid to John Qualen and his wife. When Qualen watches his wife jump in front of a subway train with the kid it was the most shocking moment of the film. He points Ford in the direction of Mander.

The second is when Mander has a rush order for a baby from a really wealthy couple and steals Rochelle Hudson's baby just born and fakes an adoption without her consent and tells her the baby died. As I said that oily British charm is played against type much like when he played Giles Conover in one of the Sherlock Holmes film series.

Ford and Hudson were a pair of attractive and winning leads. But Mander owns what could have been a far better film had the Code allowed for more frankness.

early Glenn Ford

[blanche-2 · 5/10 · 3 May 2013]

"Babies for Sale" is a B movie, a very early Glenn Ford film, from 1940, produced by Columbia. This type of movie was often used to train up and coming stars and to see if they caught on with the public.

Ford plays investigative reporter Steve Burton who wants to write about the illegal baby racket, where unscrupulous "charities" sell babies for cash. His editor gets a lot of pressure when the story is published because adoption agencies think it's a bad reflection on them. When asked to print a retraction, Burton quits.

He eventually gets onto an illegal baby racket headed up by a unscrupulous doctor (Miles Mander). A young widow, Ruth Williams (Rochelle Hudson), has gone to his agency for a place to stay until her baby is born, not realizing her chances of getting out of there with her baby are next to nothing. They pressure her to sign a release, but she refuses. After her baby is born, she is told her baby died. With the help of another woman, she gets away and is approached by Burton. A recently-released woman (the one who helped her initially) joins in the investigation with Ruth and Burton.

These exposes were often over the top, and this one is no exception. However, it tells a human story with sympathetic characters. Ford is 24 years old and darkly handsome, with that beautiful smile, and despite some personal difficulties -- and interrupting his career for World War II -- he went on to a long career until his retirement in 1991. Rochelle Hudson is very sympathetic as a young mother who is certain her baby is not dead.

As a couple of reviews pointed out, apparently there were no illegitimate babies born in the United States at that time. If there had been unwed mothers in the film, I suppose they would have been depicted as sluts, otherwise the Hayes office wouldn't have allowed it.

Still, it's a good, well-acted film.

I got nothing to lose I've lost everything already!

[sol-kay · 7/10 · 3 May 2013]

****SPOILER**** Ground breaking film about the baby selling racket that has poor single and destitute expecting moms have their newborn babies stolen right out of the maternity ward and sold to unsuspecting rich childless couples. The "Mercy Shelter" Run by the unscrupulous Dr. Rawkin, Miles Mender, has been doing just that for years until crusading reporter Steve Burton, Glenn Ford , got wind of it and set to put it and all other baby selling joints out of business and their owners behind bars. It was the kind and good Doctor John Gaines, Joe De Stefant, who clued Burton in to what was going on in places like the "Mercy Shelter". That in Dr. Gaines feeling that Burton by having the story printed in a big time city newspaper would shed some light on it and the sleazy goings on that its involved in. Froced to retract the story by his boss, who was pressured to do so, Burton goes on his own to exposed the baby selling racket and the people behind it.

It's single mom Ruth Williams, Rochelle Hudson, who's husband was recently killed in an auto accident who helped Burton get his story out to the public. Ruth having a healthy and full of life baby has Dr. Rawkin in an effort to steal and sell it to the highest bidder falsifies the child's birth certificate making it look like Ruth's baby died at childbirth. Rawkin planned and did sell Ruth's baby to a rich childless couple the Kingslys Arthur & Thelma, Selmer Jackson & Mary Currie,thinking that the babies parents were both killed in a car accident.

***SPOILERS*** It's both Burton and Dr. Gaines with the help of a fingerprint or footprint expert Sgt. Mike Burke, Ben Taggart, of the local police department who found out that the death certificate was a fake with the footprints on the certificate not matching those of Ruth's baby on it's actual, the one that Dr. Rawkin thought he destroyed, birth certificate papers. It took an outraged Arthur Kingsley, who wife Thelma almost suffered a nervous breakdown when she heard the news, to get Rawkin to brake down and admit his crime, with the police in the other room listening in, and beg for forgiveness. But by then it was too late for him in that the damage was already done and Dr. Rawkin along with those who ran his "Mercy Shelter" were shipped off to the nearest police holding pen to face the wheels justice.

P.S As for Ruth she got her baby back but she was one of the lucky few. Many single moms who's babies that Dr. Rawkin stole from right under their noses were never able to find or see them again!

Can legal technicalities really be ignored?

[mark.waltz · 6/10 · 10 July 2022]

If anyone in a professional institution ever indicated that philosophy to me, I would be walking out instantly and reporting them to the authorities, but that's not what happens with Miles Mander as the amoral doctor running a clinic for expectant mothers who can't afford a regular hospital. The widowed Rochelle Hudson refuses to assign a release form allowing him to put her baby up for adoption, and as a result of that becomes victimized by his determination to provide a child for a married couple desperate to adopt. His idea is for the wife to enter the clinic as a patient and have illegal documentation indicating her as the natural mother. Reporter Glenn Ford is snooping around, and eventually, that's how the clinic gets busted, but in the meantime, a lot of people are hurt.

Case in point. Adoptive father John Qualen comes in with his wife indicating that the baby they adopted is mentally ill, something they were not informed of when they adopted it. The mother, distraught over the fact that he will not take the baby back, commits suicide, baby in her arms when she jumps. Mander is a sneaky, deceitful man, and it's obvious that he's going to get Hudson's baby one way or another. Georgia Caine, as the housemother, is his accessory, kindly on the outside but just as vile as Mander. Isabel Jewell, as another expectant mother, has some great lines, expressing her hatred of Caine with no regret.

Playing a role that a year or so ago would have been given to Rita Hayworth, Hudson is excellent and really expresses the horror of her situation. Ford gets progressively involved in his determination to expose the clinic, and with everything that Mander is up to, the audience remains on the edge of their seat in their desire to see him destroyed. Above average programmer doesn't bog itself down with unnecessary scenes that don't advance the plot in one way or another. It is a vile situation, but perhaps the women in the situation are presented a bit too glamorously rather than downbeaten like they would be in real life. I guess they were trying to avoid this being an extremely exploitive film, but as a message movie, that would have made the impact a lot greater.

I actually thought this was a terrific B-movie.

[planktonrules · 8/10 · 2 May 2013]

"Babies For Sale" is a bit salacious, but still a terrific B-movie. Now B-movies often have come to mean sub-par to many but a B is far different. Sure, some were very poor but some others prove that just because a film has a low budget and short run time does NOT mean it can't be very entertaining. You see, the Bs served a purpose--they were meant as a second feature in a double-feature. This did NOT mean they needed to be bad or even average!

Glenn Ford plays a reporter who writes a story about black market babies--kids available from disreputable adoption agencies for a price. However, his editor receives a lot of heat for the story and demands Ford writes a retraction. Instead, he quits and decides to investigate further and prove the story is true. The trail leads to one of the instigators of the crusade against the reporter--a real scum-bag with no scruples whatsoever! At the same time, a young mother-to-be is in trouble---her husband has died and she's alone. She goes to the agency not to have the child adopted but for a place to stay--which they promise her. However, they have no intention of letting her keep her baby and plan on adopting it out to some rich folks. How they plan on getting away with this and how it all ends, you'll have to see for yourself.

While I do agree with the other review that the film isn't 100% frank (none of the mothers in this place seem to have illegitimate kids--which seems ridiculous), the story is very tight, exciting and, at times, quite moving. To me, it's a great example of how to do a B-exposee film--and one that seems underrated.