Victimas del Pecado

Ninón Sevilla

Emilio Fernández's Victimas del Pecado (Victims of Sin) is a terrific musical melodrama from 1951. The film is situated within the Mexican caberetera genre. This genre almost always depicts the depredations faced by urban prostitutes and is set in red light district dance halls and dens of iniquity. Victimas del Pecado is no exception, but allows its heroine glimmers of a better tomorrow.

The film's heroine, Violeta, is played by Ninón Sevilla, one of the outstanding female stars of caberetera films. Like many of the leading figures of the genre, Sevilla was of Cuban birth, though she eventually settled in Mexico. Sevilla brings a ferocious intensity to her role whether she is dancing the mambo or rumba or giving a piece of her mind to the male villains of the movie. Her character works in the Changoo, a swanky nightclub that caters to gangsters and is presided over by the lordly and officious Don Gonzalo (Francisco Reiguera). Dance hall girls are expected to cater to the whims of their clients and fork over the majority of their earnings to their pimps. One of these gals, Rosa (Margarita Ceballos) finds herself pregnant, but the father, Rodolfo (a superb Rodolfo Acosta), refuses to acknowledge the child and urges Rosa to ditch the wee bairn and go back to selling her body. Overcome by her masochism, Rosa places her babe in the nearest waste bin thereby regaining her status as one of Rodolfo's trulls. Hearing of this, Violeta endeavors to rescue the male infant and adopt him. This earns the wrath of Don Gonzalo and he evicts Violeta and the newborn from his premises.

However, Violeta has earned the admiration of another club owner, the taciturn Santiago (Tito Junco), for her dancing and moxie. Soon, Violeta not only has a room for her son, named Juanito, at Santiago's club, but is attracting patrons with her dancing at the cantina named La Máquina Loca. It is notable that Santiago runs his club with a more democratic spirit than the autocratic Don Gonzalo. The patrons are mostly working class rather than criminals. Violeta offers them sizzling rumbas, a more proletariat dance than the upscale mambos and cha-chas dished out for the patrons of the Changoo. Violeta fingers Rodolfo for a murder committed during a movie theater robbery and settles down with Santiago, providing a nurturing home for Juanito. After six years, Rodolfo is sprung from the pen and arrives to settle the score. 

Ninón Sevilla and Francisco Reiguera

Even if the dramatic scenes in Victimas del Pecado were less than stellar, which isn't the case, the film would be worth seeing for the musical and dance sequences alone. The dancing is fiery and the musical numbers by Perez Prado, Rita Montaner, and Pedro Vargas are outstanding. All the technical aspects of the film are first rate, a tribute to the craftmanship of those who toiled at the Churubusco Studios. The sound is particularly good, credited to James L. Fields, an American who settled in Mexico after the Second World War and racked up over six hundred credits before his death. The outstanding black and white cinematography is by Gabriel Figueroa, like Fernández a giant of the Mexican cinema. His work here combines elements of expressionism, as in his work on John Ford's The Fugitive and the gutbucket realism of his work for Luis Buñuel, as in the previous year's Los Olvidados. Fernández and Figueroa expertly utilize actual locations to further the film's motifs and themes. The repeated use of Nonoalco bridge and its railyard environs convey how the action of this film is played out on the wrong side of the tracks while the inclusion of the Monumento a la Madre underlies the theme of maternal sacrifice central to the character of Violeta.

The cast of Victimas del Pecado is almost uniformly excellent. The only fly in the ointment is Margarita Ceballos who is not up to the melodramatic demands of the downtrodden Rosa. As Santiago, Tito Junco, a significant Mexican film star who appeared in The Exterminating Angel and Death in the Garden among many other films, is deft at showing his character's humanism lurking beneath his tough guy facade. Rodolfo Acosta, who popped up in many American films and television shows during his twilight years, is a memorably pungent brute. Reiguera, who played the title role in Orson Welles' unfinished Don Quixote, is an effectively snarling menace in bourgeoise garb. Fernández marshals his very disparate band of talents into a short (84 minutes), sharp mural.

Fernández shows great restraint in his handling of the picture. His work here displays that a lurid plot and pleasing performers are enough to involve an audience and that virtuoso directorial flourishes would only distract from the spectacle. He does pan in to his characters for emphasis, but is largely content to hold Figueroa's gorgeous shots in stasis. The wordless prelude in which Rodolfo admires himself in the mirror after tonsorial ministrations, preening like a peacock, is the first of many examples. When that stasis is broken, Sevilla jumping through a window towards the camera to rescue her son, the film's four evocative tracking shots, Fernández is able to provide kinetic moments that remain lodged in memory. The point of cinema.