Crime Scene is a monthly Vague Visages column about the relationship between crime cinema and movie locations. VV’s Victims of Sin essay contains spoilers. Emilio Fernández’s 1951 film on The Critierion Channel features Ninón Sevilla, Tito Junco and Rodolfo Acosta. Check out more movie breakdowns at the film essays section.

Midway through Emilio Fernández’s 1951 film Victims of Sin, there is a wonderful tracking shot that encapsulates much of the movie’s exuberant, feminist energy. Having turned to sex work after being fired as a nightclub dancer, protagonist Violeta (Ninón Sevilla) is attacked by wannabe pimp Rodolfo (Rodolfo Acosta) in her home. The other women of the street come to her aid in solidarity, and Fernández cuts to an image of everyone at the police station afterwards, lined up against the counter. The camera pans from right to left, finishing at Violeta and Rodolfo but finding time to survey the faces of the women who came to help: old, young, tired, fresh-faced, made-up and plain. Victims of Sin centers female solidarity from the off, and this is its most explicit image: a gang of women from the margins of Mexican society, all standing together to bring down a man who is intent on causing misery to one of their number.

Victims of Sin is otherwise part of a larger stream of noir-inflected social melodramas common to Mexican Golden Age cinema of the time, an era when the country’s film industry was in full swing with multiple studios producing movies at a thrilling rate. As so often with other various “golden ages” of cinema, quantity begets quality; a film industry which emerged partly to fill the gap created by Europe and the USA as they got involved in WWII found itself producing cinema at a mass quantity in studios, many of them based in Mexico City. Within that system, yes, there was plenty of forgettable, derivative material, but also a certain level of minimal technical quality (thanks to guaranteed regularity of work for film crew and cast), and a home for genuine visionaries (Luis Buñuel being probably the most famous). 

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Like many films of its era, Victims of Sin is largely studio-bound, with much of the movie taking place in the two differing nightclubs of Changoo and La Maquina Loca. Changoo, where the film opens, tends towards the more well-off, featuring a larger band and more performers. The grottier La Maquina Loca, where Violeta ends up after adopting a baby (after being fired from the Changoo and turning to sex work), tends to a more working-class clientele, located as it is next to a train yard.

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The contrast between the two sets up a simple dichotomy within Victims of Sin, which tends to pair character types: the solidarity and collective action of the women vs. the predatory, lecherous behavior of the men; the class and race-based hierarchies of the Changoo (epitomized by its sleazy owner) vs. the openness and warmth of La Maquina, with owner Santiago (Tito Junco) being one of the few “good” men in the film, going so far as to take in Violeta and her son as an adoptive family. Superficially, this might seem polemical, and Victims of Sin certainly is a product of its time and place in regard to its prescriptivism, but Fernández’s movie far surpasses its simpler elements because of its rather glorious and noirish textures.

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Take the imposing figure of Rodolfo, who Victims of Sin presents as a signifier of everything “wrong” with contemporary Mexican society. He impregnates women then ignores them, forcing them to dump the baby in the street (it’s this which compels Violeta to rescue her friend’s child and adopt him). Rodolfo is a serial criminal and perpetually greedy. He’s also the first figure seen in the film, as Fernández opens Victims of Sin with Acosta’s character in a barbershop. It appears to be an interior scene, but the camera pans around as Rodolfo leaves to a street on an outdoor stoop, where he roams the neighborhood freely. Many of the character’s entrances into the Changoo and La Maquina see him arrive from the mezzanine at the top, before descending into the dance floor beneath, like a feudal lord arriving to stake his claim.

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In contrast, Violeta and Santiago are rarely, if ever, given this top-down visual descent in Victims of Sin. Both characters usually enter the nightclub from the dance floor level, forced to accept their social position. Even Tito’s position as a nightclub owner — seemingly a well-off individual — is precarious, at risk from parasitical forces. That the name of the club Changoo is derived from Changó, a spirit from Yoruba mythology, links the location to Mexico’s colonial and racial past (and present), and that the Changoo clientele is largely white when La Maquina’s is more mixed, is a quietly-placed irony touching on racial appropriation and the warped context of pop culture’s ever-shifting touchstones.

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Fernández, a mainstay of Mexican Golden Age cinema as both a director and actor, uses various textures to ground Victims of Sin’s melodramatic and prescriptive tics. To be clear, there’s nothing “wrong” with these melodramatic elements (modern film culture has long since deemed melodrama a dirty word when it is, in fact, a glorious thing for a film to be), but what elevates the drama is the contrast between a brash, sensationalistic and socially-conscious story and subtle, expressive directing that finds its way into the material in unexpected ways. In the leading role, Sevilla is charismatic and sensual; the Cuban-born actress was initially a dancer and Victims of Sin’s many musical sequences pay testament to that. But as Sevilla emerged as a star, she also staked a claim as a leading lady of substance, capable of commanding the screen on her own.

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Amidst all this is a Mexico City that was undergoing massive changes in the 1950s. The region expanded rapidly throughout the 20th century to become, alongside São Paulo in Brazil, the largest city in Latin America. In a film reasonably low on location shooting, Fernández still provides glimpses of the capital’s major landmarks (often caught before or after scenes at the Changoo). These monuments dwarf the main characters, reminding them of their insignificance in the bustling metropolis. But it is the entrance of La Maquina Loca that sticks in the mind, with Violeta traversing a smoky, factory-dotted industrial landscape, with trains thundering across, before entering the club’s welcoming confines. Both versions of the city are imposing, but one arrives in hell and the other at a haven: the community of one is formed around state-led iconography, whereas the other is generated organically through people seeking respite from hard work. Again, these symbolic pairs are simple on paper, but they’re given an earthiness in Fernández’s hands, and elaborated on in the nightclubs themselves.

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The nightclub is a stock location in crime cinema — a place where the sleazy, the glamorous and the greedy get to mix together and let their hair down. In Victims of Sin, it’s the centerpiece of a bustling world at the margins of official society, where rules are broken but tolerated. Fernández’s 1951 film is a wonderful, noirish study of what it means to move through its central locations.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

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