Celebrating the Silver Screen’s Latino Heritage

Here’s a question for you: Who was the first Latino to win an Oscar as best actor?

And the winner was the multitalented Puerto Rican actor, director and writer Jose Ferrer, honored for his bravura performance in 1952’s “Cyrano de Bergerac.”

A photo of Ferrer, in full musketeer drag and sporting the gigantic roller coaster of a nose that keeps him from pursuing his beloved Roxanne, is part of a modest but thought-provoking exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Hung in the Wendy and Ken Ruby Gallery, the show features more than 30 black-and-white photos of Latinos who have helped shape Hollywood.

Most of those honored are actors like Ferrer, but a handful are off-camera personnel. Among the latter: Francisco “Chico” Day.

First assistant director to Cecil B. DeMille on his remake of “The Ten Commandments” (1956), Day was at Paramount for more than three decades. The first Mexican-American assistant director in the Directors Guild, he was the younger brother of actor Gilbert Roland, evidence that industry nepotism wasn’t confined to Anglos even then. Day was also production manager on such varied films as “The Magnificent Seven,” “Patton” and “Hello, Dolly!”

Titled “Latinos in Hollywood,” the show is one of the city of Los Angeles’ official Latino Heritage Month events. A similar show goes up next week on Olvera Street, in an effort to ensure that the contributions of Latinos to American film and television are recognized on both the West and East sides of the city, according to curator Alycia D. Enciso.

At the Skirball, the photos hang in the hall outside the auditorium, where visitors can view them while the museum galleries are closed for renovation. (Hours are noon to 3 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. The exhibition ends Oct. 18.)

Described in the official brochure as a “lavish pictorial exhibit,” the show is actually quite modest, although its purpose is laudable and its scope ambitious. Without resorting to polemics, the exhibition illustrates the point made in a report released this year by the Screen Actors Guild: Latinos are underrepresented on screen, despite the fact that they comprise more than 10% of the nation’s population and represent the fastest-growing market for TV and movies.

The show makes the viewer aware both of the enormous contributions of industry Latinos and of the relative dearth of familiar names and faces. My guess is that only film buffs with AARP cards are aware of the talent of such fine performers of the past as Mexican-born Katy Jurado, who helped make “High Noon” a near-perfect picture. Indeed, I’ll give a gold star to anyone who can tell me, without looking it up, the name of the film that won Jurado an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress.

The show contains both rare images and some that seem inevitable. No exhibition on “Latinos in Hollywood” would be complete without the smiling face of Desi Arnaz. Best known for nettling Lucille Ball both on and off screen, the Cuban-born bandleader was also a true industry pioneer. When the couple’s Desilu Productions bought RKO, Arnaz became the first Latino studio head. He also pioneered the use of three cameras in the shooting of television shows and, with Ball, all but invented TV syndication.

When I visited the exhibition this week, a number of photos lacked explanatory labels (they were en route from Enciso’s office, I learned). Fortunately, there was information about most of the more obscure individuals, such as Hugo Fregonese, an Argentinian director who made B movies at Universal during the ‘40s and ‘50s before moving to Europe.

In a world in which most people’s ethnicity is--happily--mixed, there are inevitably some surprising Latinos included in the show. I thought of Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song,” which lists famous people who are more or less Jewish, when I saw the show’s publicity still from the 1987 film “Stakeout,” with Richard Dreyfuss, Madeleine Stowe and Emilio Estevez. Almost everybody knows that Estevez is Latino, thanks to his father, Martin Sheen. But who knew that Stowe is of Costa Rican heritage?

Although precious few Latinos had starring roles in major Hollywood pictures of the past (Rita Hayworth, born Margarita Cansino, Anthony Quinn and silent-screen star Ramon Navarro are notable exceptions), many more were cast in minor roles as the exotic Other. One such was Movita Castenada, who briefly graces the screen as one of the Tahitian beauties in the 1935 “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

She was the second wife of Marlon Brando, who subsequently fell in love with a real Tahitian beauty, Tarita Tariipia, whom he met while filming his version of “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1962).

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Today, some of the most respected names in the industry are Latino, including the ubiquitous Edward James Olmos, multifaceted Ruben Blades, character actor Hector Elizondo, Brazilian-born Sonia Braga and the late Raul Julia. But this show made me hungry to learn more about Latinos in Hollywood. A knowledgeable clerk at Samuel French Theatre & Film Bookshop in Studio City recommended George Hadley-Garcia’s “Hispanic Hollywood.” It was nowhere to be found in the Valley, but I have it on order.

Meanwhile, I picked up director Richard Rodriguez’s “Rebel Without a Crew,” an account of the making of “El Mariachi,” the movie that made him a 23-year-old Hollywood wunderkind. Did you know that he got a major chunk of the film’s $7,000 budget by serving as a guinea pig in a research lab’s drug study?

As to the movie that won Katy Jurado an Oscar nomination, it was “Broken Lance,” the 1954 Edward Dmytryk Western starring Spencer Tracy.

Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at [email protected].