Actors and Sin – 1952

Laughter and tears

This mini-anthology diptych written, directed and produced by Ben Hecht is about the business-end of the acting and the producing arts, two tales split in opposite extremes, each like the ancient "Thalia and Melpomene" masks of drama in which one is laughing and the other is crying, somethign that pictures the two stories Hecht has put together here.

We get Woman of Sin, a farcical "inside" look at a Hollywood film production that goes to epic lengths to realize the vision of a script of the same name by hitherto unknown writer Daisy Marcher. She has a fast-talking, shape-shifting agent named Orlando Higgens who is able to keep drawing concessions and higher dollar amounts for a contract for the script from Empire Studios who is desperate to nail down the screenplay. A delighted Higgens moves fast to draw out more and more money on the deal, but aside from a single phone conversation Higgens has had with Marcher, he has never met her and is negotiating with a lot of assumptions in his head about what this suddenly mega-successful writer will want.

The script's success itself is pure accident, it was supposed to be sent back to the writer (i.e., rejected) but instead was accidentally placed at Empire Studios where super-producer J.B. Cobb (Alan Reed) saw it in a pile. Though he disclaims the practice of ever bothering to read scripts, he reads this one, and eventually declares"I consider Woman of Sin better than Gone With The Wind by twice! It's not only a great masterpiece of woman psychology and human soul and drama but one of the greatest pieces of box office entertainment we've ever gotten our hands on! ....It's what this country needs, a great story of animal love! ...And in starting this picture, I am fulfilling a dream I've had for twenty-five years of someday giving to the world a cinema masterpiece that will prove once and for all that Hollywood has come of age as a center of art! Woman of Sin is such a masterpiece!"

But as the cameras get ready to roll and the machinery of production moves, we know there's a complication just waiting to be discovered, something only known to a candy-addicted mother (Jody Gilbert), the talent agent (Eddie Albert) and his secretary (Tracey Roberts as "Miss Flannigan") which is that Woman of Sin has been written by a precocious nine-year old girl.

Jenny Hecht is the energetic, highly-intelligent and slightly weird little girl who, when discovered, is quick to understand the legal complications. The kid uses her leverage to force a contract for four more movies, the next to be an ultra-violent pirate movie called Sea of Blood based on a script she's written with a technical advisor who is a tubby little neighborhood boy (Alan Mendez) who we see carrying around toy sail boats.

The now compromised J.B. Cobb hates the script for crazily over-the-top violent Sea of Blood but is still anxious for Woman of Sin, not to mention the legal complications from setting up a movie deal with a minor, and so he will have to produce it plus another three movies in the future from the munchkin scriptwriter.

Tracey Roberts plays the efficient, loyal and very tightly-wound secretary that the super-agent is constantly locking lips with, in fact this segment about movie making seems to imply that, as J.B. Cobb said when praising Woman of Sin as a masterpiece, Hollywood is rife with "animal love." But for our sakes, somehow writer (and director) Ben Hecht is able to make the smarm be only an implied smarm, and the 'animal love' is the goofy domain of rather goofy adults, and the innocent children are where the real energy of Hollywood resides.

The other tale, which is first of the two mini-stories, is the heavy melodrama Actor's Blood with Edward G. Robinson. He plays a "washed up, has been actor" who vanished into obscurity but then rises back up to use his career of long-passed theatre experience to emotionally support his grown up daughter (Marsha Hunt) who is a star on Broadway.

We watch as her career begins to falter and implode as her likewise "real world" relationships do the same. The illusion of value derived from belonging to a "superior" world of art and using art as a protective shield against trouble and troubled relationships can only carry a person so far. Marsha Hunt plays the role of a woman who cannot keep the two separate worlds from colliding.

Hecht shows a dynamic not unlike that of the later Oscar-nominated 1983 The Dresser in which the backstage help makes what happens on the stage, happen. But Hecht's story is also a bit like the problem of the "vorvolaka" in Val Lewton's 1945 Isle of the Dead in which a vampire-like monster doesn't draw blood from a victim, but uses a close relationship to psychically drain the energy of life itself from them.

Actor's Blood can be viewed as a simple tragic tale of the drama behind the drama in theatrical life where career and private life crisscrosses, or it can be a horror film, or a twisted mystery-drama. The worn-out, jaded and hopeless daughter dies by her own hand, and the truth of whether it was suicide or murder has to be explained through the character examination of Eddie Robinson's paternal force. Critics are shown as acid-tongue assassins, but also a kind of priesthood who raise up the spectre of a career as if that is the summation of a person. The confusion between what is a life lived and a life portrayed is given a strange send-off at the end, with a critic saying of self-annihilation through stagecraft as "a lovely piece of old-fashioned mummery."

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Original page August 14, 2015 | Updated July 2021