The Wages of Sin is a 1938 American drama film directed by Herman Webber and starring Constance Worth, Willy Castello, Clara Kimball Young, and Blanche Mehaffey.

The film begins with a long subtitled introduction, stating 90,000 women in the US go missing annually and suggesting many are forced by circumstances to join the "Sisterhood of Sorrow".

Marjorie Benton, who is "just a kid," dreams of an office job, but works at the Pacific Laundry and is the only breadwinner for a family of coarsely-spoken strikers and loafers.

[1] In the lengthy nightclub scene, Jan Duggan sings "The Seashell Song", which she first sang in the 1934 W. C. Fields film The Old Fashioned Way.

However, he also made a number of exploitation films, including The Pace That Kills (1935), Smashing the Vice Trust (1937), Race Suicide (1938), and Mad Youth (1940).

Advance publicity was avoided because exploitation films were quickly and cheaply made, and like Esper, Kent handled his own distribution and exhibition to independent cinemas.

To expand the film to a marketable length, exploitation filmmakers like Kent used "padding," often setting the main characters in a nightclub, which became an excuse for a series of acts.

[4][5] The film was never released in Australia, where Jocelyn Howarth (Constance Worth) had been an up-and-coming stage and screen actress in the early 1930s.

Lon Jones, a Hollywood-based journalist writing for The Sydney Morning Herald commented that "it is a story of white slavery, and is very sordid.