Actors and Sin

This two-part feature from Ben Hecht and his distinguished cameraman Lee Garmes begins with a magnificently theatrical-styled performance by Edward G. Robinson, befitting an odd murder-mystery replete with thunder and theatrical effects at the end. He and daughter Marsha Hunt play thespians, and as we witness her rise and fall of a career on stage, Hecht injects his highly personal barbs concerning critics and the hangers-on of the Broadway milieu.

Less successful is the accompanying piece, "Woman of Sin", in which Hecht cast his 9-year-old offspring Jenny Hecht as the author of a sexy romantic screenplay, which causes a ruckus allowing him to ridicule prudishness and venality in Hollywood.

Eddie Albert has fun starring as an unscrupulous agent who unwittingly sells Jenny's dirty script. The vignette is filled with in-joke name dropping of real names, none of which have stood the test of time. The joke about kid as writer is spoiled by little Jenny's embarrassing attempt at acting -her subsequent career as actress is laughable.

Firstly, there absolutely IS an apostrophe in the title of this film! The title is shown on screen as 'Actor's Blood and Woman of Sin' with the words 'Actor's', 'And' and 'Sin' in bold, while the other words are in grey; the title is therefore meant to be 'Actor's and Sin'. I agree that some posters and references miss out the apostrophe, but it's there in the film!

As regards the film itself, it is far from being alone as a portmanteau production, and the two parts are meant to complement each other. The first story - 'Actor's Blood' - is a melodramatic tale about the theatre which is very theatrically staged. The actors play it very straight. Edward G. Robinson, in particular, is very stilted and stagy in his performance; there again, he is playing a former 'ham' actor whose reviews said as much, so his take on the role is fitting. The story is no match for Conan Doyle, but is an entertaining enough whodunit with an implausible but acceptable twist at the end. Marsha Hunt and Dan O'Herlihy are reliable, as always. The second story, 'Woman of Sin' is a farcical skit on contemporary Hollywood. The plot doesn't bear analysis, but that's not the point. I found it funny and witty (not the same things!). Eddie Albert, Tracey Roberts and Alan Reed deliver fluent, satisfying performances which drive the narrative forward convincingly. Ben Hecht's daughter Jenny plays Daisy as a precocious yet amusingly infantile nine-year-old. She made me laugh, anyway, especially near the end when she is unseen, in the taxi, answering Higgins's orders with 'Check... check...'. The only weak link was Alan Mendez as Daisy's friend, Capt. Moriarty. He IS only a kid though! I enjoyed this film though I recognise it's no 'Citizen Kane'. There again, it wasn't trying to be.

The first half is a 43 minute film called Actor's Blood. Edward G. Robinson plays an older actor whose daughter is a current star but troubled. She dies at the start and the rest of the film is a who done it. This part is pretty good. The second film stars Eddie Albert and is a fairly silly story about a nine year old female author that writes adult love stories. This one is called Woman Of Sin.

In two short features released as one picture, written and directed by Ben Hecht. In the first, Marsha Hunt becomes a Broadway star to the great admiration of her father, Edward G. Robinson. She throws it all away in affairs and booze; her murder leads Robinson to assemble a cohort of possible assassins. In the second, agent Eddie Albert sells a script to mogul Alan Reed, who's convinced this is going to be the greatest picture Hollywood ever produced. When it turns out the author is nine-year-old Jenny Hecht (daughter of Ben), there's a lot of covering-up to do.

It's the last of seven movies that Hecht directed himself. He seemed to have gotten it into his head that Hollywood got everything wrong, and wished to make films with the writer having the final say, the way they did in the theater. There's something in that, but his attempts at doing serious movies wound up being pompous and not particularly popular; well, he got paid amazing sums of money for his writing by the people he despised.

That pompousness shows up in the first story. The second, a burlesque of the way Hollywood was doing business and thinking it art, is acidic and often very funny. Reed is hilarious in his mock humility, and Albert's businesslike demeanor with secretary Tracey Roberts until they suddenly start necking is also very funny. The first story is disappointing, but the second makes up for it.

There were a lot of live television anthology series in the 1950s and both the episodes in this movie could have have been good episodes. Both lack movie quality production values and cinematography. The nice things is watching Edward G. Robinson, Marsha Hunt, Alan Reed (later voice of cartoon Fred Flintstone) and Eddie Albert doing some fine acting. Ben Hecht does not appear to be very good at directing, but the actors help him out by trying to punch up the material. The first half/episode is a mild "Who Done It" that satirizes the Broadway Theatre. It is no way in the ball park of "All About Eve" "The Saxon Charm," and "Sweet Smell of Success," but it draws some blood as a light murder mystery. The second half/episode "Lady of Sin" has Eddie Albert as a roguish Hollywood Agent and Alan Reed as a typically tyrannical movie studio boss. They both milk the comedy nicely. I had been reading Anita Loos' autobiography "A Girl Such As I," and she mentions that she turned Ben Hecht's first movie idea into a screenplay for Douglas Fairbanks. The plot revolves around a 9 year old writer who sells a script called "Lady of Sin" to a movie studio who think its quite sophisticated. Loos talks about how she wrote her first scripts when she was quite young (around 23 actually) and the people at Biograph Studios, thought that she was a sophisticated older woman. When four years later, when she met the studio heads for the first time, her mother accompanied her and they all thought her mother had written the scripts. At just 4'11," Loos still looked like a teenager. The studio heads, including D.W. Griffith were shocked and astonished when they realized it was the daughter and not the mother who had written the 100 plus scripts they had bought. Clearly, Ben Hecht, just exaggerates what happened with Anita Loos and D.W Griffith here. Ben Hecht's daughter actually does a fine job as the brat of a writer here, especially given that Hecht was not a great director. To sum up, two amusing stories, but with poor production values worth and bad direction, but worth watching for the good writing and good actors.