Victims of Sin

I saw "Victims of Sin" as part of the annual Noir City festival at Chicago's Music Box Theater. TCM's Eddie Muller was on hand to introduce the film, and he spent a good while talking about the magnetism of the film's star, Ninon Sevilla. And boy was he not kidding. She is a dynamo in this film, a hard-edged noirish tale about a nightclub performer who takes an abandoned baby under her protection and spends the rest of the film protecting it and herself from a thuggish gangster.

This film has some content that an American film would never have gotten away with, and there are a few moments in it so rousing that the audience I saw it with burst into cheers and applause. There are a lot of musical moments in the film, quite a few showcasing Sevilla's talents as dancer. But even in the non-musical moments, there's something about this movie that feels like a musical. It moves like one, as if a choreographer had a hand in blocking out all of the scenes.

It's not a long film, but yet I did feel like it overstayed its welcome by a hair. The end teeters into the kind of melodrama that for me gets tiring pretty quickly. But that's a small complaint -- mostly this film is a blast.

Grade: A.