The Kalends of Exploitation: Sing Sinner Sing

Note: This is the kind of movie that ought to be a mess, and maybe it is a little, though it looks better than many Poverty Row productions. But Leila Hyams keeps the whole thing on the rails. She's likable, believable, and never acts like she's above the material. The movie may be a minor Pre-Code oddity of interest only to Pre-Code fans like us Thirties buffs, but Hyams makes it feel like something worth sticking around for.

Sing Sinner Sing
1933 / 1:04
Tagline: “Would You Plead Guilty to a Crime You Did Not Commit---To Save Some One You Love?”
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In this tale of modern Babylon, we are introduced to a floating casino moored off the coast of Los Angeles - a vessel not of commerce, but of pleasure, where jazz music and bathtub gin flow in equal measure. Here sings a lady of torch and torment, whose voice, though sweet, is steeped in sorrow. She is bound, not by love, but by a tempestuous entanglement with the ship’s proprietor - a man of volcanic temperament and dubious fidelity.

Upon discovering his dalliance with a chorus girl of questionable virtue, our heroine, in a fit of wounded pride and reckless ambition, resolves to marry a millionaire playboy. This gentleman, though possessed of wealth and charm, is pursued by a specter more fearsome than poverty: the hereditary madness that haunts his bloodline. He drinks not for pleasure, but to silence the howling of ancestral banshees. His descent into hopeless drunkenness is portrayed with a frankness that startles us post-modern movie-goers in 2026, accustomed as we are to the innocuous buffoonery of the comic relief drunks of Code-era Hollywood.

Paul Lukas, a gentleman of Hungarian extraction, imbues his role with a fiery Magyar nobility, though the lines he is given are as wooden as a church pew. Leila Hyams, the torch singer, is a vision of loveliness and restraint, her performance elevated by the presence of Ruth Donnelly, who plays the worldly-wise companion with a wit as dry as vermouth. Don Dillaway, as the doomed heir, astonishes with a moment of clarity and rebellion, denouncing the snobbery of his wealthy guardians with a fervor worthy of a Dickensian hero.

The sets, borrowed from a more prosperous studio, are sumptuous, and the costumes - particularly Miss Hyams’ beaded gowns - are of such elegance that My Bride, a fiber artist of exacting taste, insists they be mentioned in tribute. The music, a curious blend of fox-trot jazz and early swing, is delightful, though the musicians remain anonymous, as if swallowed by the very fog of the era.

The plot, it must be said, is melodrama of the highest order, but the film’s true distinction lies in its origin: the Pre-Code era, that brief interregnum between the advent of sound and the iron rule of censorship. Here, the moral atmosphere is low and thick, like the air in a gambling hell. Women are brazen, men are debauched, and virtue is a thing to be mocked. The film does not flinch from showing the consequences of folly, nor does it pretend that wealth can purchase peace of mind.

In conclusion, this picture is not a moral beacon, but a lantern held up to the darker corners of human desire. It is a cautionary tale, wrapped in sequins and shadow, and though I am a man of puritanical leanings, I confess: it held me fast.