Leon Ichaso, Whose Films Explored Latino Identity, Dies at 74

Leon Ichaso, a Cuban American filmmaker who in “El Super,” “Crossover Dreams,” “Piñero,” “El Cantante” and different films examined themes of Latino assimilation and cultural identification, died on Sunday at his house in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 74.

His sister, the journalist Mari Rodriguez Ichaso, mentioned the trigger was a coronary heart assault.

Mr. Ichaso, who got here to the United States as an adolescent, was writing promoting copy and making tv commercials in New York in 1977 when he noticed an Off Broadway play known as “El Super,” written by Ivan Acosta, and determined to strive a brand new profession.

“I remember he went to see it and said to me, ‘I’m going to make that movie,’” his sister mentioned.

He proceeded to just do that, on a shoestring funds.

“I paid for the production car,” she added. “My father paid for the catering.”

The film, launched in 1979 and directed by Mr. Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal, is a few Cuban man (performed by Raimundo Hidalgo-Gato) dwelling in exile in New York who works because the superintendent of an Upper West Side tenement, resisting assimilation. Critics have been impressed.

“It’s a funny, even-tempered, unsentimental drama about people in particular transit,” Vincent Canby wrote in a overview in The New York Times. Decades later, The Miami Herald, assessing Mr. Ichaso’s profession, known as “El Super” “the quintessential Cuban-exile film.”

He adopted “El Super” in 1985 with “Crossover Dreams,” a few salsa star on the rise who hopes to interrupt out of Spanish Harlem and into the mainstream. The movie, which Mr. Canby known as “a sagely funny comedy, both heartfelt and sophisticated,” gave the singer Rubén Blades his breakout performing function.

After “Crossover Dreams,” Mr. Ichaso moved away from Latino-themed movies for a time and labored steadily directing tv films and episodes of “The Equalizer,” “Miami Vice” and different sequence. But he returned to that territory in 1996 with “Bitter Sugar,” a film set in up to date Cuba.

“Bitter Sugar” went in opposition to the romanticized view of life in Havana that was in style in some inventive circles on the time, portray an unsightly image of town that included medication and prostitution. Its protagonist begins out pro-Communist however finally ends up so disillusioned that he tries to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Mr. Ichaso resented that many festivals didn’t choose up the film — a end result, he mentioned, not solely of the movie world’s leftist leanings but in addition of competition officers’ want to not offend the organizers of the Havana Film Festival.

“They don’t want to lose the Cuba account,” he advised The New York Times in 1996. “Part of the film community very much flirts with a dictator and a country and says it’s cute to travel, have a daiquiri and ignore what’s going on just 50 yards outside the Hotel Nacional.”

Mr. Ichaso’s subsequent main challenge would grow to be maybe his most acclaimed movie: “Piñero” (2001), about Miguel Piñero, a former jail inmate turned playwright whose “Short Eyes” made it to Broadway in 1974, however who died younger in 1988.

Benjamin Bratt, who was acquainted to TV audiences from “Law & Order,” performed Mr. Piñero, a Nuyorican, in what Stephen Holden, reviewing the film in The Times, known as “a career-defining performance.” Mr. Bratt attributed a lot of his success within the function to Mr. Ichaso.

“His utter faith in my ability never faltered even when mine did,” Mr. Bratt mentioned by e mail. “He loved his actors, understood our delicate temperament and nurtured a trust that would embolden you to walk out on a wire with no net. He was the net, and it was very easy to love him back for this.”

In “El Cantante” (2006), Mr. Ichaso advised the story of the salsa singer Héctor Lavoe. The singer Marc Anthony, portrayed Mr. Lavoe with Jennifer Lopez (Mr. Anthony’s spouse on the time) as Mr. Lavoe’s spouse.

In Mr. Ichaso’s films, “you can almost smell the rooms the actors are in,” Mr. Anthony advised The New York Times in 2007. “He knows how to create a period piece; he understands the streets, the humanity of it and the poetry of it all. He captures the essence of our people, our neighborhoods.”

Although Mr. Ichaso continued to direct for tv till lately, his final Latino-themed movie was “Paraiso” in 2009. Considered the third movie in his trilogy concerning the Cuban exile expertise (following “El Super” and “Bitter Sugar”), it tells the story of a person who arrives in Miami by raft and proceeds to wreak his personal model of havoc. It was, Mr. Ichaso acknowledged in a 2009 interview with The Miami Herald, proof of his ever-darkening view of Castro’s authorities.

“I do think of the three films as a trilogy, and this one is the end,” he mentioned, “exploring the new arrivals, these new little Cuban Frankensteins that Castro makes and sets loose on the world.”

Leon Rodriguez Ichaso was born on Aug. 3, 1948, in Havana. His father, Justo Rodriguez Santos, was a poet and author, and his mom, Antonia Ichaso, wrote for Cuban radio.

When Leon was 14, he left Cuba for Miami along with his mom and his sister; his father joined them there in 1968. By then, Mr. Ichaso had tried faculty briefly however dropped out. The household quickly moved to New York, and there Mr. Ichaso realized about filmmaking by capturing commercials for Goya Foods and different purchasers.

Mr. Ichaso’s marriages to Karen Willinger and Amanda Barber resulted in divorce. His sister survives him.

Though Mr. Ichaso’s movies have been usually effectively regarded, he by no means fairly ascended to the directorial An inventory.

“There are some directors who make a film, and they are set for life; that’s not my case,” Mr. Ichaso mentioned in a 2007 interview with The Times. “Every time I make a film, I think, ‘This is the one.’ But then nothing happens.”

Mr. Bratt, who met his spouse, the actress Talisa Soto, whereas they have been engaged on “Piñero,” mentioned he admired Mr. Ichaso’s risk-taking.

“There was a lively curiosity to him, a twinkle in the eye that hinted of mischief and knowing, a survivor’s wink that told you he had been to hell and back and probably enjoyed it,” Mr. Bratt mentioned. “He had a deep passion for poetry and music, and his films — inspired by the work of his heroes, Miles, Monk and Coltrane — were pure jazz, respectful of compositional structure but most alive when he played outside the lines, riffing, daring you to follow along.”