LGM Film Club, Part 554: Victims of Sin

Emilio Fernandez’s 1951 film Victims of Sin is far from a perfect film, but boy does he push the envelope in a way that you simply could not in Hollywood. Fernandez was Mexico’s premier director (arguably at least) in these years. You might know him even if you’ve never seen any of his films–he’s the generalissmo Mapache in The Wild Bunch.

Victim of Sin stars the Cuban singer Ninón Sevilla, who became a big star after moving to Mexico. There’s plenty of dance scenes here that are very well done. But that’s not the reason to recommend this film. It’s that it reminds one of pre-code Hollywood. Sevilla plays a dancer who has moved up a step at the dance club/brothel where she works–she’s now a full time dancer. But that’s still a tenuous existence. All the other women are prostitutes and unlike in Hollywood at this time, nothing is hidden about this. There’s an absolute scumbag of a pimp played by Rodolfo Acosta with the perfect level of malice, indifference, and general hatred of women. He’s gotten one of the other girls pregnant. She’s had the baby but he won’t acknowledge the child. She’s desperate to get back with him. She can’t work at the club with the baby around either. So she drops it in a trash can to follow her pimp.

Sevilla rescues the baby and tries to raise it as her own. She gets fired and has to work the street brothels. Another club owner, far less horrible, played by Tito Junco shows up one night and says she should come work for him. She doesn’t, but when Acosta shows up and nearly kills her, she does. He goes to prison, they try to raise the boy, some years pass, bad things happen. Then a ridiculously positive ending that doesn’t do justice to the overall tenor of this very gritty film and also solves every plot issue in the last two minutes.

But outside of that, you have a film about prostitution, pregnancy, abandoned children, violence, and the general underside of the world in a way that even the grittiest film noir could not approach in 1951. Plus some really good music and dance scenes. It has a lot to recommend it, despite its weaknesses. Plus that image above amuses me enough that I paused the film to take a picture of it, useful for social media and friend chat rooms and such.