''Actors and Sin'' is a 1952 American
comedy film
A comedy film is a category of film which emphasizes humor. These films are designed to make the audience laugh through amusement. Films in this style traditionally have a happy ending (black comedy being an exception). Comedy is one of the ol ...
written, produced and directed by
Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht (; February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. A successful journalist in his youth, he went on to write 35 books and some of the most enjoyed screenplay ...
.
The film marks
Edward G. Robinson's second film with actress
Marsha Hunt.
It is also known by its section names of ''Actor's Blood'' and ''Woman of Sin''.
Lee Garmes
Lee Garmes, A.S.C. (May 27, 1898 – August 31, 1978) was an American cinematographer. During his career, he worked with directors Howard Hawks, Max Ophüls, Josef von Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock, King Vidor, Nicholas Ray and Henry Hathaway, whom ...
was codirector and cinematographer, as he was on most of the films that Hecht directed.
Plot
The film
lampoons
A parody, also known as a spoof, a satire, a send-up, a take-off, a lampoon, a play on (something), or a caricature, is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its s ...
the
Hollywood motion picture industry and is separated into two sections. The first section is ''Actor's Blood'', a
morality play
The morality play is a genre of medieval and early Tudor drama. The term is used by scholars of literary and dramatic history to refer to a genre of play texts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries that feature personified concepts ( ...
about legitimate theater. The second section is ''Woman of Sin'', a send-up of Hollywood greed.
''Actor's Blood'' takes place in New York City.
Broadway
Broadway may refer to:
Theatre
* Broadway Theatre (disambiguation)
* Broadway theatre, theatrical productions in professional theatres near Broadway, Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
** Broadway (Manhattan), the street
**Broadway Theatre (53rd Stree ...
star Marcia Tillayou has been found shot dead in her apartment. Her father Maurice is himself an actor, and had watched her theater career rise as his own declined. She had let success overcome her, and had thus alienated critics, fans, producers and her playwright husband. She had a few recent stage flops before being murdered.
''Woman of Sin'' takes place in Hollywood. Dishonest writers' agent Orlando Higgens has been receiving frantic calls from Daisy Marcher about a screenplay that she had written titled ''Woman of Sin''. Thinking they are crank calls, Higgens tells her to never again call his office. He then learns that because of a mail mixup, her screenplay had been received by film mogul J.B. Cobb, a man who had once passed on ''
Gone With the Wind
Gone with the Wind most often refers to:
* ''Gone with the Wind'' (novel), a 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell
* ''Gone with the Wind'' (film), the 1939 adaptation of the novel
Gone with the Wind may also refer to:
Music
* ''Gone with the Wind'' ...
'' based on Higgins' advice. Cobb thinks that Higgins sent the script and offers him a lucrative sum for the rights. However, Higgins does not know where Daisy is or that she is actually a nine-year-old child.
Cast
''Actor's Blood'' sequence:
*
Dan O'Herlihy as Alfred O'Shea, Narrator
*
Edward G. Robinson as Maurice Tillayou
*
Marsha Hunt as Marcia Tillayou
*
Rudolph Anders
Rudolph Anders (December 17, 1895 – March 27, 1987) was a German character actor who came to the United States after the rise of Hitler, and appeared in numerous American films in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
Biography
He was born Rudo ...
as Otto Lachsley
*
Peter Brocco
Carl Peter Brocco (January 16, 1903 – December 20, 1992) was an American screen and stage actor. He appeared in over 300 credits, notably ''Spartacus'' (1960) and '' One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' (1975), during his career spanning over 60 ...
as Frederick Herbert
*
Robert Carson as Thomas Hayne
*Herb Bernard as Emile
*Alice Key as Miss Thompson, Tommy
*Irene Martin as Mrs. Murray
*
Joseph Mell
Joseph Mell (June 23, 1915 – August 31, 1977) was an American film and television actor. He was known for starring as Burt Stone in the 1971 film ''The Ski Bum''. Mell died in August 1977 in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 62.
Partia ...
as George Murray
*Ric Roman as Clyde Veering
*Elizabeth Root as Mrs. Herbert
''Woman of Sin'' sequence:
*
Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht (; February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. A successful journalist in his youth, he went on to write 35 books and some of the most enjoyed screenplay ...
as Narrator
*
Eddie Albert
Edward Albert Heimberger (April 22, 1906 – May 26, 2005) was an American actor and activist. He was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor; the first nomination came in 1954 for his performance in ''Roman Holiday'', ...
as Orlando Higgens
*
Alan Reed
Alan Reed (born Herbert Theodore Bergman; August 20, 1907 – June 14, 1977) was an American actor, best known as the original voice of Fred Flintstone on ''The Flintstones'' and various spinoff series. He also appeared in many films, includin ...
as Jerome (J.B.) Cobb
*
Jenny Hecht
Ben Hecht (; February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. A successful journalist in his youth, he went on to write 35 books and some of the most enjoyed screenplay ...
as Millicent Egelhofer, Daisy Marcher
*
George Baxter as Vincent Brown
*
John Crawford as Gilbert, Movie Actor
*
Douglas Evans as Mr. Devlin
*
Paul Guilfoyle
Paul Vincent Guilfoyle () (born April 28, 1949) is an American television and film actor. He was a regular cast member of the CBS crime drama ''CSI: Crime Scene Investigation'', on which he played Captain Jim Brass from 2000 to 2014. He retu ...
as Mr. Blue
*Sam Rosen as Danello
*
Tracey Roberts as Miss Flanagan
*Toni Carroll as Millicent, Movie Star
*
Jody Gilbert
Jody Gilbert (March 18, 1916 – February 3, 1979) was an American actress.
Biography
Gilbert was born in Fort Worth, Texas. She studied voice and acting at Columbia University, and was a graduate of Pasadena Playhouse.
One of her first notabl ...
as Mrs. Egelhofer
*George Keymas as Bill Sweitzer, Producer
*Alan Mendez as Captain Moriarity
*Kathleen Mulqueen as Miss Wright
*
Cameo appearance
A cameo role, also called a cameo appearance and often shortened to just cameo (), is a brief appearance of a well-known person in a work of the performing arts. These roles are generally small, many of them non-speaking ones, and are commonly eit ...
s by:
*
Betty Field
Betty Field (February 8, 1916 – September 13, 1973) was an American film and stage actress.
Early years
Field was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to George and Katharine (née Lynch) Field. She began acting before she reached age 15, and went ...
,
Louis B. Mayer
Louis Burt Mayer (; born Lazar Meir; July 12, 1882 or 1884 or 1885 – October 29, 1957) was a Canadian-American film producer and co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios (MGM) in 1924. Under Mayer's management, MGM became the film industr ...
, and
Jack L. Warner
Jack Leonard Warner (born Jacob Warner; August 2, 1892 – September 9, 1978) was a Canadian-American film executive, who was the president and driving force behind the Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California. Warner's career spanned some ...
Reception
In a contemporary review for ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', critic
Howard Thompson characterized the film as "an almost reverential close-up of a stage actor's senile egomania and an atomically conceived blast at front-office intellectuality in the film factories." Thompson called ''Actor's Blood'' a "stiff, glum and narcissistic tale ... the whole episode flounders midway between a conversational seance and a straight farce" and ''Woman of Sin'' "straight farce, with an idea so devastatingly impudent that only Mr. Hecht could claim it."
In reference to the film's two sections, ''
DVD Talk
DVD Talk is a home video news and review website launched in 1999 by Geoffrey Kleinman.
History
Kleinman founded the site in January 1999 in Beaverton, Oregon. Besides news and reviews, it features information on hidden DVD features known as ...
'' writes "Both are light, breezy, and inconsequential, though admittedly written with an expert's ear for dialogue and a knack for clever story twists." They write that both sections "move at an efficient pace", and praise Ben Hecht for the dialog and rhythm of his scripts. They also note that the actors were well chosen, finding flaw only in the child actors used in the ''Woman of Sin'' segment. They did have critique about the material itself, noting that while Hecht knew his way around both Hollywood and Broadway, the subject matter comes off as a little "too inside". They were also disappointed in the two stories, finding the plotlines "fairly hokey and predictable". However, and despite the "hackneyed narrative", they found the film overall to be "very watchable", in that Hecht's sense of timing kept the project from being boring.
''
DVD Verdict
DVD Verdict was a judicial-themed website for DVD reviews. The site was founded in 1999. The editor-in-chief was Michael Stailey, who owned the website between 2004 and 2016, and the site employed a large editorial staff of critics, whose reviews ...
'' wrote that "the most intriguing element" of the film, and not properly promoted by the film's trailer, is that "it is actually two brief films combined in one package." In analyzing ''Actor's Blood'', they wrote that there was "an opportunity for insight and depth in this story, but it would seem that Mr. Hecht wrote the screenplay while in a blind rage." They offered that the material might even have been comedic but for it being "preposterously heavy-handed". They felt that the actors generally spoke each line over-dramatically and floundered, with only Edward G. Robinson "able to make this work within the context of his character". In their analysis of ''Woman of Sin'', they found it to be "reasonably engaging early on as a breezy satire", despite the concept of a story written by a nine-year-old "earning words of praise and adoration from the likes of Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer". They noted that the cameos by the studio heads were amusing, but that the story was derailed by the use of Ben Hecht's daughter Jenny in the role of child screenwriter Daisy Marcher. They felt that she was "fingernails-on-a-blackboard grating" in this role, in that she "dials up every aspect of precociousness that can afflict a child actor as high as it can possibly go, and her presence effectively destroys any sense of comic momentum that the film had built up to that point," making her use a clear example of the problems inherent in nepotism.
They concluded that the film would stand as "an interesting curiosity for Hollywood history buffs, but fails as a cinematic experience."
Controversy
Upon original release, several theater chains refused to screen the film because it lampoons of stage and screen. This resulted in a lawsuit by United Artists and Sid Kuller Productions against the A. B. C. Theatres Company.
References
External links
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Actors and Sin
1952 films
Films directed by Ben Hecht
American comedy-drama films
1952 comedy-drama films
American black-and-white films
Films with screenplays by Ben Hecht
Films scored by George Antheil
United Artists films
1950s English-language films
1950s American films