Victims of Sin

This movie (which is in the Criterion Collection!) is a hot scramble of piety and passion, sentimentality and sleaze; it’s the ultimate cabareteras (dance hall) flick. Cuban dancing sensation Ninón Sevilla plays Violeta, an up-and-coming performer at Club Changoo who oversteps when she rescues a newborn from the garbage can where one of her fellow artistes has dumped it. This gets her fired and wins the enmity of Rodolfo (Rodolfo Acosta), the Zoot-suited sadistic pimp who fathered the child.

As in his earlier smash Salon Mexico, director Emilio Fernandez switches up the rollercoaster emotions with hits of mambo, rumba and cha cha cha. Around the edges, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa conjures the kind of urban slum poetry you find in French classics of the 1930s.

DCP Courtesy of Janus Films

Perhaps the greatest of the cabareteras movies… Emilio “El Indio” Fernández’s 1951 Víctimas del Pecado (Victims of Sin) should really be titled Fuerzas de la Naturaleza (Forces of Nature). A tumultuous product of Mexican cinema’s Golden Age, the movie is a perfect storm, the confluence of three huge talents: It was directed and cowritten by the nation’s most macho filmmaker, given to boasting “There is only one Mexico, the one I invented”; it was shot by Mexico’s greatest cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa (an even tougher Communist than his mentor Sergei Eisenstein); and it stars filmdom’s ultimate rumbera, a thirty-year-old bolt of lightning, the Havana-born, sensationally uninhibited dancer Ninón Sevilla.

J Hoberman, Artforum

Victims of Sin... goes full throttle. Ninón Sevilla, the Cuban-born star of musical rumberas films, plays our heroine, Violeta, with irresistible verve. Onstage there’s a mini-anthology of music by Pérez Prado, Pedro Vargas and Rita Montaner (who charms with a spicy number called “Ay José”). But there’s music, too, in the movie’s melodrama.

Nicolas Rapold, New York Times

This irresistible Mexican film, newly restored, takes place in the world of seedy nightclubs, arrogant crime lords, hot music, and beautiful women.

Jeffery M Anderson, Combustible Celluloid