Jaime Sánchez
Broadway came first, at eighteen. In 1957 Sánchez played Chino in the original cast of West Side Story, a start that made his name and set a bar most careers never clear again. He has been working on stage, television and film since the 1950s, and the film record held here is short, uneven and unusually heavy at the top.
Two of these are permanent. In The Pawnbroker he is Jesus Ortiz, the young assistant who keeps trying to reach a man who has closed himself off, in one of the most serious American films of the 1960s. In The Wild Bunch he is Angel, the youngest of the gang and the only one with a village to answer to, which is what gives the film its conscience and most of its trouble. Both roles do the same thing: they make the older men around him look at what they have become.
After that the parts thin out, as they did for most Puerto Rican actors of his generation working in Hollywood. He is Pvt. Colombo in the Pacific war film Beach Red, Delvecchio in Bobby Deerfield, Luis Castillo in the mid-1980s action picture Invasion U.S.A., a priest in Bad Lieutenant, and Rudy in Carlito's Way. The last two are small, late and well used, a director's way of saying the face still carries the 1960s with it.
Movies (7)
Where to start with Jaime Sánchez
Start with The Pawnbroker. Sánchez is the warmth in a film with almost none, and the performance works because he keeps offering something the film has already told you will not be accepted.
Then The Wild Bunch, where Angel is the moral pressure point of the whole gang. Watch how the older actors adjust their playing around him; the film would collapse into pure spectacle without that part, and it is his best-known work for good reason.
For the range, Beach Red is a serious and underseen war picture, and Bobby Deerfield uses him quietly in a European-set drama. The later credits are brief but sharp: Carlito's Way and Bad Lieutenant both give him a couple of minutes and both know exactly what they are borrowing. Invasion U.S.A. is the paycheck entry, and there is no shame in that.