Víctimas del pecado aka Victims of Sin (1951) Classic "Golden Age" Mexican Noir

A Cabaretera - Zoot Suit Noir that manages a magical fusion of gritty big city Film Noir with Afro-Caribbean-Cuban-Mexican Musical and the Western.                                                            (Noirsville)

Directed masterfully by Emilio Fernández. 

Written by Emilio Fernández and Mauricio Magdaleno and based on Magdaleno's story. The phenomenal Cinematography was by the great Gabriel Figueroa, and the Music was by Antonio Díaz Conde. 

Just based on the amazing visuals that continually top those in the preceding frames this film has shot into my personal 10/10 list of Black & White International Noir. And get this, I first watched a streaming un-subtitled version that was cropped from an Academy ratio to a 1.78:1 (16:9). Its a simple story and since I'm part Italian and have lots of Hispanic friends, between the similarities of the two languages and the very animated acting, it is pretty easy to figure out what is going on. That says a lot, and I have since purchased the current DVD available (it has English subs), but I'd easily re purchase it again if a Blu comes out. The film plays like a Noir Music Video and and you can even enjoy it that way. If you are a Noir Visual junkie once you see it it will be unforgettable. 

Ninón Sevilla as Violeta 

Tito Junco as Santiago

 

Rodolfo Acosta as Rodolfo

Víctimas del pecado stars Ninón Sevilla (Aventurera) as Violeta , Tito Junco (The Exterminating Angel) as Santiago, Rodolfo Acosta (he was in a lot of American Westerns, Hondo, Bandido!, From Hell to Texas, One-Eyed Jacks, and one of my personal favs Rio Conchos, American Noirs One Way Street, The Tijuana Story) as Rodolfo. 

Rita Montaner as Rita

Ismael Pérez as Juanito

Margarita Ceballos as Rosa

With Rita Montaner as Rita, Arturo Soto Rangel as Director de prisión, Francisco Reiguera as Don Gonzalo, Lupe Carriles as Doña Longina, Ismael Pérez as Juanito, and Margarita Ceballos as Rosa.

A story about Chilangos

The tale takes place roughly in the "Zona Rosa" a red light district and particularly near the railway line into Buenavista station at the El puente de Nonoalco, Mexico City.

Cabareta Changóo,  The name Changóo is a satiric take on Changó (aka Xangô, Sàngó or Santa Barbara). Changó is the most popular Yoruba orisha (or spirit) in the practice of Santeria, the spirit of fire, lightning, thunder and war, but also of music, drumming and dancing. Club Changóo is a major venue for introducing Afro-Cuban culture to Mexico. 

Francisco Reiguera as Don Gonzalo with Violeta

Changóo is owned by Don Gonzalo a gaunt club impresario always decked out in a tuxedo. Besides customers, the cabaret is filled with ficheras - B-girls / prostitutes / entertainers who turn tricks for the pachuco, zoot suit wearing, pimp Rodolfo. Don Gonzalo probably either gets a big piece of this action, or the drink buying clientele attracted by the women is a big percentage of the net, either way it's a lucrative symbiotic relationship. 

We first see Rodolfo at an out door-open air street barber. He's getting spiffed up for a hot night of dancing just down the alley at Changóo.

Rodolfo is your classic slime ball hood rat circa 1950. Slicked back black hair. Droopy chevron moustache with a two tone meerschaum cigarette holder stuck jauntily in his pie hole. A white silk ascot tie over a black shirt. A Zoot Suiter. High waist pegged pants with a "reet pleat," and a plaid jacket in a "drape shape," with a white pocket handkerchief in a "puff" fold. On his feet two tone shoes and its all all topped off with a wide brim fedora, that has a pleated band, and a diamond crown fold. 

Rodolfo tips the barber, and heads towards the mambo tunes emanating from Changóo, down at the far end of the neon and incandescent string light, lit alley. 

Changóo has an exotic tropical motif. Support columns resemble palm trunks. Neon coconut palm trees flash on and off. Neon crescent moon glows on a wall. 

Changóo has a bar top that has, as bookends, tacky, amply endowed, carved women. Sort of like sexualized wooden Indians. They are erotically dressed in corsets, garter belts and stocking's. The cabaret has a full dance floor with a live band (Pérez Prado and his Orchestra) playing Afro-Cuban mambos, boleros, and Mexican fusions of them. Rita Montaner is the star vocalist for the Afro-Cuban music. 

Rita Montaner

Here is where we first see Violeta the Cuban "rumbera" during the first musical number of the film "Changó." Rumbera were the dancers and actresses that swayed to Afro-Caribbean rhythms. The song "Changó" synthesizes the ritual singing of Santeria and mambo with brass, bongo, congas and güiro accompaniment. Basically the effect is a ritualized mambo.

Violeta's first number

After Violeta's number, Pérez Prado plays a modern Swing tune that Rodolfo jives to with one of his ficheras on the dance floor. 

Rodolfo jiving

On another night at Changóo, Rosa, another of Rodolfo's ficheras enters the cabaret carrying Rodolfo's newborn son. Rodolfo is up in his perch, the "catbird seat" the galleria overlooking the dance floor. Rosa goes up the stairs to see him. He backs away, refuses to acknowledge her, or the baby as his. 

Violeta and the other girls take up a collection for Rosa and the baby. Rosa, however becomes desperate after Rodolfo's rejection, and is obsessed with getting his acceptance. She follows Rodolfo out of the club in a determined daze and down the street to a rendezvous with his gang of pachucos with a car that they probably stole. 

Taking up a collection for Rosa

Don Gonzalo wants Rosa and her baby out of the club

Rodolfo goes to meet his pachucos

At the car, Rodolfo tells Rosa that she can come but not the baby. She has to choose him or me. He looks at a trash can and tells her that she knows what to do with trash. 

What a scumbag. Rodolfo has the car door open waiting. Desperate, Rosa leaves her baby laying atop a full, sanitation department, open topped, trash can.

Rosa gets in the car and it speeds off. They rob a theater box office in another part of Mexico City gunning down the ticket seller in the process. 

The box office holdup

When Rodolfo and Rosa return to the club Violeta notices Rosa dancing and no baby in sight. Violeta grabs Rosa, drags her off the dance floor, and asks Rosa where her baby is. 

Knowing the two principals involved and expecting the worst, Violeta slaps the truth out of Rosa. Violeta runs out of the club and down the street to grab up the baby just before a garbage truck arrives to collect the trash.

Don Gonzalo is not happy with Violeta brining the baby into Changóo. Violeta tries to see for the welfare of the baby in various ways. She asks some Indio women with children if they would nurse the boy for her and that she would pay them for the trouble. They tell her that their menfolk would not approve. She takes the baby to a hospital where a nurse shows her how to properly care for the baby. She also sets her up with baby formula and other sundries.

On another night Violeta has to bring the baby again to Changóo. After she finishes her number it all goes start going down the trail to Noirsville when Don Gonzalo fires her. Rita, the clubs singer has it out with Don Gonzalo and quits in protest. She tells the crowd that she is no longer performing and that starts a riot. It sort of resembles a classic Western barfight.

You're fired!

Violeta in desperation without a job, resorts to working as a prostitute to support the baby she now calls Juanito. 

One night, while Violeta is selling her ass out on the sidewalk in front of her crib, a man nonchalantly saunters slowly down the road. He is wearing denim, with a cowboy hat, a jean jacket, neckerchief, cowboy boots, and smoking a cigarette. He looks like he's wearing a similar getup to that that Robert Mitchum wears in his rodeo cowboy film The Lusty Men (1952). 

Santiago and the mariachis

The man is followed by a full mariachi band playing music. This hombre's got a lot of style. When he goes whoring, he brings his own music to screw by, lol. 

He is Santiago, an ex railroad engineer and now owner of La Máquina Loca (The Crazy Machine) a dive cabaret for working class nacos and railway men. It's located on the side of the tracks into Buenavista Terminal just below la Puenta Nonoalco (Nonoalco Bridge). Whether its the right or wrong side of the tracks is irrelevant, the whole film is about the wrong side of the tracks.

Santiago is checking out the merchandise on display, until he finds Violeta, a "buenota güera," she is "la rubia con piernas de oro" (the redhead with the legs of gold as Ninón Sevilla was actually known).

Don Santiago chooses to bestow his "charms" on Violeta. He takes a liking to her and tells her that Juanito reminds him of a son he once had. Afterwards tells her that if she wants to get out of the cribs he'll give her a job as a B girl working the customer at La Máquina Loca. 

? you can have a job at my place La Máquina Loca. 

You want outa here 

querida

Violeta is afterwards visited at the cribs this time by Rodolfo. He tries to convince her to go to work for him as a fichera. 

While Rodolfo is making his play he hears the baby. He tells Violeta that he will take care of that baby once and for all. Rodolfo moves towards Jaunito in his hanging bassinet.

Violeta attacks. She grabs Rodolfo pinning him around and pushing him onto the bed. She dives on top of him spitting and screaming beating his face. Rodolfo flings her off. She flies across the room and  falls against a wall.

Rodolfo jumps up and stands over her slapping her face. All the screaming and yelling brings all the whores from the street crowding into Violeta's crib. 

The whores grab Rodolfo off Violeta and beat and kick him. It's a regular "pussy riot." The police show up and haul them all off to the police station.

pussy riot

At the station Violeta rats out Rodolfo for the box office hold up, and he is hauled off to prison. He eventually gets five years.

Violeta now takes Santiago up on his offer of a job. She gathers up Juanito and makes her way to la Puenta Nonoalco where she climbs down the stairway to the track level and the rail side cabaret La Máquina Loca.

Santiago makes good on his offer instructing his clubman to give Violeta and the baby room upstairs that the girls use for a lounge. Violeta borrows a dress and starts her B girl hustling. It works out good for all, Santiago soon upgrades her status, employing her as a featured dancer now at La Máquina Loca. He also becomes over time the de facto head of her household little Juanito is baptized and now has a real family. 

Violeta the B girl with the railroad men

Violeta as a cabaretra

Bongocero Jimmy Monterrey rt.

It all goes Noirsville when Rodolfo is finally released from prison and comes looking for revenge on Violeta.

Noirsville

Emilio "El Indio" Fernández creates a masterpiece in re-visiting Cabaretera Noir. His first was Salon Mexico (1949) This film checks all that boxes of what a great Noir made around the early 1950's should contain. 

Gabe Figueroa's cinematography is visually dark, graphic, and gritty. He is an equal to Alton, Guffey, Diskant, Ballard, and Musuraca.

The story hits on all cylinders, the music and dance routines are eye openly progressive compared to any films produced by Hollywood of the same vintage. 

The Music is for the most part diegetic and is provided by the Pérez Prado Orchestra, Jimmy Monterrey's "bongocero" rumba band, a un-credited Jalisco mariachi group playing Santiago's leitmotif "el tren," and even the famous Mexican crooner Pedro Vargas gets to do a number as a celebrity guest in the Changóo audience.

Visual highlights are the warren like back alleys, the neon lit clubs, the early morning railyard views from El puente de Nonoalco, the prostitute cribs. Acosta's Zoot Suit "jive" dance, all of Ninón Sevilla's numbers, Rita Montaner singing "Ay, José" wink wink, which never would have been permitted by the Legion of Decency or the Motion Picture Production Code here, the "pussy riot," and a cool Western gunfight at the railyard.

All the performances are spot on, Sevilla, Junco, Acosta are excellent and especially of note is the acting by Ismael Pérez as Juanito with some very compelling sequences. Screencaps from Mirada DVD 10/10. 

Detroit Institute of Arts considers the film as "one of the most famous post-war Mexican films," and shares that it includes "knockout mambo numbers by Pérez Prado and Pedro Vargas".[ Detroit Film Theatre. Retrieved February 3, 2013.] The film was also released as Hell's Kitchen.

(from IMDb)

An Unexpected Pleasure, Crammed with Surprises 

For people raised primarily on Hollywood films, particularly those from the 1950's on, this dazzling immersion in sin of all sorts may come as a surprise--in how many films, for instance, is a baby left unceremoniously in a garbage can on the street? And only Hitchcock, in Shadow of A Doubt, can created an ominous creepy feeling when a train chugging into the Santa Rose depot spreads an ominous black cloud over a group of relatives waiting for a beloved uncle? It happens here, with dazzling results during a shootout next to a cabaret on the fringes of town; all through the film the camera creates seedy worlds almost surreal, and places in them the lead, Ninon Sevilla, with even more energy to spare than Ann Miller, an actress whose life is a constant battle of survival for herself and an adopted son.

No use to relate the plot, the joys of revelation, and the heavy melodrama enriched with often shocking complexity. This film is great fun for the viewer interested in a special change in cinematic exposures.