Word: pachucos
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DIED. DON TOSTI, 81, hard-driving bandleader who inspired a Latin-music craze in the '40s with the tune Pachuco Boogie; in Palm Springs, Calif. Originally a violinist for the El Paso Symphony, he played bass in jazz combos led by Jimmy Dorsey and Jack Teagarden. But it was his fusion of boogie, blues, swing and Latin beats that propelled him to become the first Latin artist to sell a million records...
Olmos, who is 41, is getting plenty of nourishment these days. Nine years after he earned a Tony nomination and L.A. Drama Critics award for his portrayal of the streetwise El Pachuco in Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit, he is being touted for an Oscar nomination for his riveting performance in Stand and Deliver. Based on a true story, the film depicts three years in the life of a Bolivian-born math teacher named Jaime Escalante, who in 1982 helped 18 of his students at East Los Angeles' gang-ridden Garfield High pass the Educational Testing Service's advanced placement...
...highly controlled intensity. Playing the teacher in Stand and Deliver or Lieut. Castillo in Miami Vice, he holds in his energy, radiating it through a laser-beam stare. He is every minority rebel putting his fireworks on a long fuse. In a few roles -- the strutting El Pachuco in Zoot Suit or the crazed, canine avenger in Wolfen -- Olmos cuts loose and explodes with more than his eyes. Nostrils flare, teeth flash, the body language becomes incendiary...
Olmos was right on the wavelength of "El Pachuco," the strutting, posing, super-macho narrator and mordant conscience of the story. "I spoke in calo, street jive from the streets of East L.A. -- a mix of Spanish, English and Gypsy," he says. "They asked me if I could dance, and I hit a perfect set of splits, turning the brim of my hat as I came up." He got the part...
Playwright Luis Valdez has tried to shape this tale as a mixture of myth, documentation and fantasy, but he never gets past the ABCs in any category. Edward James Olmos is electrifying as the embodiment of the mythic hero known as El Pachuco, but the script short-circuits him, and he is reduced to cynic snarls and stylized struts. Daniel Valdez is winning as a gang leader with unstained valor. He is stalemated in a TV-style love triangle between his loyal Chicano girlfriend (Rose Portillo) and a Jewish minority-rights defender (Karen Hensel) of inflammable zeal...