5 Movies / October 13, 8 p.m.
National Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15 to October 15, is a time to honor the contributions of those whose heritage is rooted in Latin culture. TCM kicked off the month in September with programming focused on the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and another evening featuring a few of the most noteworthy Hollywood actors of Hispanic background. This month spotlights three more Hispanic actors whose long careers included a wide variety of roles and genres.
Ricardo Montalban (1920-2009) began his career in 1942 in his native Mexico and made his Hollywood debut in the Esther Williams musical romance Fiesta (1947). He worked steadily up until his death at 89, most recently providing voice talent for a number of American animated TV series. Although he appeared in more than 60 films and dozens of television shows, he is probably remembered most by contemporary audiences as the Star Trek villain Khan and as Mr. Roarke in the long-running show Fantasy Island (1977-1984), the resort host who was regularly alerted to the arrival of “de plane!”
This evening’s programming gives viewers a chance to see him in roles that helped him break away from his Latin Lover typecasting. He is top billed in Border Incident (1949) as a Mexican federal agent joining forces with an American operative to bring down a criminal gang illegally smuggling farmworkers into the U.S. In Mystery Street (1950), he is once again on the side of the law as a detective of Portuguese descent who pairs with a Harvard professor on the case of a human skeleton found on a Massachusetts beach, one of the earliest films to feature forensic procedures.
Mexican-born Katy Jurado (1924-2002) had a similar career trajectory to Montalban’s, debuting in Mexico in 1943 and coming to Hollywood in the early 1950s. True to Hollywood’s treatment of ethnic actors, she was often cast as the stereotypical “Latin spitfire” in Westerns; one of these, Broken Lance (1954), brought her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar® nomination. Catch her in another from this period, The Badlanders (1958), starring Alan Ladd and Jurado’s future husband Ernest Borgnine, whom she met while filming on location in Arizona. Jurado returned to work in Mexico later in her career, starring there in her final film shortly before her death at 78.
Puerto Rico native (but a U.S. resident since the age of two) José Ferrer (1912-1992) is the most lauded actor of this selection, having been nominated for Academy Awards three times, with a Best Actor win for Cyrano de Bergerac (1950). Despite his Latin heritage, he played French characters (including artist Toulouse-Lautrec) in all three of those films, as he does in one of this program’s features, I Accuse! (1958), as real-life persecuted Jewish military officer Alfred Dreyfus. He played another historical character, Hungarian operetta composer Sigmund Romberg, in the MGM musical biopic Deep in My Heart (1954). Ferrer had great success on stage throughout his life, occasionally as a director. He also directed films, including the screen version of his theatrical hit The Shrike (1955).
