Home Video Hovel: Victims of Sin, by Scott Nye
The cabaret musical, melodrama, and film noir genres constantly circle one another in American cinema, yet rarely find themselves in such satisfying fruition as Emilio Fernández’s Victims of Sin, a rediscovered 1951 Mexican film that defies easy classification other than the one that matters most – crowd pleaser. In star Ninón Sevilla, as dancer Violeta, the film has a protagonist we’re absolutely scrambling over one another to root for. Whether she’s standing up to her slimy boss at Club Changoo, castigating a colleague for abandoning her baby, and finally fighting tooth and nail and life and limb for that baby’s future, the audience can’t help but grip their armrests at each misfortune and pump their fists at each victory.
Sevilla’s career is covered quite well in the video and written supplements in this edition, so I won’t regurgitate that information here, but suffice to say she was similar to Violeta, or Violeta could be seen as an extension of herself – fiercely talented and skillfully determined, she quickly achieved star status and used it to shape the films she was in. Her dancing style, not appearing particularly choreographed or predetermined, anticipates similar sensations like Brigitte Bardot and Ann-Margret, who used their excitement and expressiveness as a greater draw than their precision. Sevilla’s dance scenes (and there are many) are the film’s most marketable highlight, and the film routinely returns to them regardless of how dire Violeta’s life has become. Her need to abandon the Changoo and eventually find work at a small rural club gives the film some limberness in the kind of dance scenes it can do. Any audience can flock to both the initial glamor and the eventual romance of life on the outskirts, a small group of poor-but-passionate artists putting on an intimate show for day laborers.
Fernández and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (who also photographed Los Olvidados, Simon of the Desert, and The Exterminating Angel for Luis Buñuel, in addition to photographing several Hollywood productions) capture her dancing from numerous angles, and editor Gloria Schoemann finds the rhythm to the music and the angles that best capture Sevilla’s luminant smile or jutting hips. We feel we are on the dance floor with her in a way uncommon to mainstream dance cinema of the era.
But as mentioned at the top, dancing is but one of the film’s pleasures, and only one of the genres it embellishes or subverts. Its take on the “women’s picture,” particularly the all-suffering mother figure that was especially popular in American films in the 1930s, at once indulges all the trappings (Violeta’s misfortunes are largely the result of her not aligning with men’s demands of a young attractive woman) while giving us a protagonist who actively and forcefully fights back against each one of them. The noir elements come late in the film and worth discovering for yourself, but the way the film ties a violent threat to a paternal figure is very key to the feminist underpinnings at work in it.
Victims of Sin had, as far as I can tell, never been released on DVD in America, making its debut in this new Criterion Blu-ray edition especially welcome. The new 4K restoration by Permanencia Voluntaria Archivo Cinematográfico and the Cinema Preservation Alliance is gorgeous, luminant, and robust. There’s a terrific use of depth in the film in both the wide shots with big crowds and the close-ups to get the full texture of the actors’ faces that the transfer carries across very well. The image varies a bit in terms of softness or contrast, common to older films, and some damage remains – though as frequent readers of this column know, that’s a plus for me. Audio has the limitations inherent to the era and is clean, crisp, and clear. While it would have been outstanding to get this on UHD, on the whole, this is a really tremendous high-definition transfer and I’m just thrilled to have the film at all available.
Criterion has produced two new video supplements with this release, starting with a 17-minute interview with archivist Viviana Garcia Besné, head of Permanencia Voluntaria, who discusses her family’s legacy in film production and archiving, segueing into their relationship with Sevilla and what made her such a popular and successful star. Next is a 16-minute interview with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon), who’s there to speak about Figueroa, and naturally has a lot of insight into the technical details of his career, how he transformed the color spectrum into black-and-white and the elements he used to create atmosphere, as well as how he worked with Fernandez on blocking and staging. It’s a great nuts-and-bolts examination that’s still easy to approach for non-specialists.
Lastly, there’s a 1983 episode of a TV show called Those Who Made Our Cinema about the Rumbera genre of films this falls into, with clips from other entries in it, tantalizing glimpses of potential future releases. While the interviews in the program are naturally standard-definition, some of the film clips are in HD – a welcome change I’d always hoped Criterion and other distributors would attempt, and which suggests some of these other films may be destined for future releases.
Included in the booklet is fantastic essay by Jacqueline Avila, professor of musicology at UT Austin, who places the film within a wider context of Mexican film and cultural history.
I was really looking forward to this release and finally catching up with this film, and neither Criterion nor the film itself disappointed. It’s a lively, engaging, swift and rousing experience, with a terrific presentation and a lot of stellar context in the supplements.