Victims of Sin (1951) reminds us that many "foreign films" are, indeed, "foreign" -- that is, based on narrative or genre formulae that strange to us and difficult to decode. The second shot in Emilio "Indio" Hernandez' Mexican rumbera shows a plump avuncular-looking fellow getting his hairdo touched up in a barber shop. (The first image is a moody nocturne showing half-comatose streetwalkers leaning against crumbling stucco walls, haloed by cigarette smoke, and a neon sign Changoo beckoning pedestrians at the end of alley -- it's spectacular, as good or better than anything in American noir, the work of the great cinematographer Gabriel Figuero.) The man in the barbershop spends a long time admiring his features while the grinning and obsequious barber waits to be paid. The man wears an oversized, flamboyantly checked Zoot Suit, trousers hiked up by suspenders so that the belt line is at the level of his nipples, and a broad silk tie, something like a cravat, that looks absurdly short. The grin on the barber's face momentarily melts away when the man pays him much less than he was expecting. But the barber then immediately resurrects his grin -- you don't want to be caught frowning at this guy. The elaborately dressed thug, then, strolls down the alleyway, passing under the white globular glare of the streetlights, to the Changoo nightclub. We don't know how to read our introduction to the pimp and criminal Rodolfo. Is he supposed to be comical? Is his weird uniform of boxy, oversized zoot suit and pants pulled up to mid-chest supposed to frighten us or is the man some kind of clown? In fact, it turns out that Rodolfo is a very bad hombre. a desperado that terrifies everyone around him. But, for an American audience not accustomed to the imagery in Mexican melodramas, it takes us awhile to get oriented.
Victims of Sin is designed to savage its spunky, indestructible heroine, Violeta, with as much suffering as any woman could possibly bear. Violeta is a much-admired mambo performer at Changoo and, apparently, a courtesan. One of the other girls working at the dance-hall has just given birth of the zoot-suited thug's son. Rodolfo doesn't want the whining infant around and he blithely tells Rosa, the mother, to throw "it" in the trash. After about 45 seconds of soul-searching, Rosa does throw the infant away, following Rodolfo right into the bloody robbery of a ticket-booth attendant at a movie palace -- the girl selling tickets is gunned down by Rodolfo. Violeta runs through the mean streets of Mexico City to the garbage can and retrieves the infant. This leads to a violent confrontation at Changoo between the women working there and both Rodolfo and the boss, a dour-looking miserly elder pimp. There's a riot when the Cuban mambo singer quits in protest over the boss throwing out Violeta and the infant. Changoo is trashed, Violeta gets savagely beaten and scarred with a razor-slash, and the girls have to become streetwalkers. (They don't walk too far, preferring to languorously line the sides of alleyway by the defunct Changoo, shopworn sirens waiting to seduce men who happen down this way.) The women league together to "squeal" on Rodolfo and gets sent to prison. Another absurdly tough hombre comes to the red light district. This is Santiago (Tito Junco), the proprietor of Cabaret La Maquina Loca, a dive that caters to railroad workers under a big viaduct. Santiago doesn't go anywhere without being followed by about 20 mariachis serenading him as he strolls among the brothels. Santiago goes into Violeta's crib, sees the baby and throws some money in his cradle. Violeta perceives Santiago as her potential savior and brings the baby to La Maquina Loca. She becomes Santiago's mistress and stars in his Mambo dance review. Santiago, despite his uber-tough demeanor is a good dude -- he has the baby baptized, marching to the church with his customary procession of two dozen mariachi musicians. The idyll is ruined when Rodolfo, the Zoot-suit pimp, gets out of prison and guns down Santiago. He beats the little boy (now six) to make him tell where Santiago hid his money. While he is thrashing the child, Violeta leaps through a window and shoots Rodolfo. She is convicted of murder and sent to prison -- this makes her adopted son homeless. The six-year old has to sleep on the streets, sell shoe-shines and newspapers to survive. For Mother's Day, he buys Violeta a pair of shoes, but gets to the prison too late to see her -- armed guards force him away from the reformatory. But, then, someone takes pity on his plight and, inexplicably, Violeta is released -- in the penultimate shot, we see the prostitute-mambo dancer and her adopted son walking through the twilight streets of Mexico City. The final image is one of Figuero's trademark shots of steam locomotives rumbling through the train yard by Maquina Loca, a grainy impeccably impressionistic study of mist intermingling with smoke among steel bridges and railroad tracks.
Victims of Sin zips along at lightning speed, the plot interrupted by about a half-dozen intricately staged dance and song sequences. (The first two-thirds of the film seem to be structured like a movie musical). The picture is a vehicle for the tawdry glamor of its leading lady, Ninon Sevilla -- she has the lean long-legged body of Cyd Charisse and features that can alternately seem very plain and even haggard or fantastically glamorous. (Figuero's camera loves her and he delights in rim-lit glamor close-ups). There are mambo songs with fantastically salacious lyrics, lots of erotic dancing and drumming, and, even, a song crooned by a Mexican lyric tenor. The scenes in which Rodolfo administers beatings to people are exceptionally violent -- he slaps Violeta about twenty times as hard as he can (it doesn't seem that a double was used and the actor doesn't pull his punches) and, then, disfigures her by slicing open her face with a razor. Figuero's photography is uniformly spectacular -- the cabarets look like picturesque infernos after the manner of the gambling dens and saloons in von Sternberg's movies, all smoky and built in deep atriums cut into the earth, pits lined by thugs and partly dressed women with a hordes of African-American drummers pounding away down in the depths. (When Rodolfo enters Changoo, we see in the background a cop literally hauling someone away -- the man, who is dead or drunk, is on the police officer's shoulder.) Figuero's photography of the train station with shadowy locomotives thundering around under clouds of black smoke is truly spectacular -- it's so gratuitously beautiful that it interrupts the action like the song and dance numbers.
Emilio "Indio" Hernandez, the film's director was one of the leading lights of the Mexican Golden Age of Cinema. He fought in army in the twenties to quash a rebellion, had to flee to the US, where he worked as a bouncer, waiter, boxer, and stone-mason (he reputedly built walls for Douglas Fairbanks). One legend about him is that he posed nude for the sculptor who designed the Oscar for the Academy Awards and that the statuette is based on his physique. In Mexico, he worked briefly as a cliff-diver at Acapulco. He directed about fifty films in Mexico and is supposed to have inaugurated the film noir movement in that country with exotic pictures like Maria Candelaria set in lagoons in Xomilicho. He made and lost several fortunes, forced the City Fathers in Coyoacan where he lived to name a street after Olivia de Havilland, a star that he worshiped from afar. (He was much closer with all the leading ladies in Mexican cinema and had a long affair with Dolores del Rio whom he shared with Orson Welles.) His personal life was chaotic with numerous affairs, wives, and legions of children. The great director can be seen in his old age in two films by Sam Peckinpah -- he plays the vicious General Mapache in The Wild Bunch and appears a El Jefe in Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
Ninon Sevilla was one of the four Queens of the Tropics featured in Mexican Rumbera films made between 1947 and 1960. Sevilla was born in Cuba and incorporated actual Yoruba and Santeria dancing into her act. A strikingly sexual dance sequence in which Sevilla struts and writhes with a Black male dancer is said to invoke Santeria religious rituals. Rumbera films involve much singing and dancing, mostly to rumba and mambo rhythms -- the pictures are set in idealized dancehalls and brothels and, generally, involve women who are forced into prostitution because of misfortune and poverty. On the evidence of Victamas del Pecado, these pictures are something of an acquired taste. The young Francois Truffaut liked these movies and published a detailed dossier on them. I can't exactly recommend Victims of Sin -- in some ways, it's a pretty awful picture, but it is certainly glorious-looking and, because so unusual, intriguing.
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