Salón México

Salón México is one of the landmark films of Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age, and one of the most fascinating. As the country became more affluent and attracted more foreign visitors in the 1949s, dance halls and bordellos sprang up across urban areas. In one such, Mercedes (Marga López) is a prostitute and dancer. She uses her earnings to send her younger sister to a private school in the hope she will have a brighter future.

Cheated by her pimp (Rodolfo Acosta — who specialized in machos) she recklessly steals his wallet and is only saved from a severe beating by the intervention of a kindly policeman, Lupe (Miguel Inclán, cast against type in a rare sympathetic role). The film’s melodramatic plot mixes hard-hitting social realism with romanticism and odd swells of patriotic fervour, along with multiple red hot dance sequences. Its success helped spark a wave of películas de cabareteras (dance hall pictures) with similar elements, Victims of Sin among them.

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A brilliant early example of the cabaretera (cabaret) genre that was just gaining popularity. Energetic and low-down, this is essentially a film noir version of Stella Dallas, with the added delight of musical numbers that take place in the nightclub of the title. The dancing is explosively sexy, full of gyrating pelvises that would have given the Hollywood censors a stroke.

Farran Smith Nehme, Village Voice