Trevor Rhone; wrote Jamaican plays, films

Trevor Rhone, 69, a leading Caribbean playwright and screenwriter who cowrote the 1972 film

The Harder They Come

, which helped introduce reggae music and urban Jamaican culture to international audiences, died from a heart attack Tuesday at a hospital in Kingston, Jamaica.

The Harder They Come starred reggae performer Jimmy Cliff as an aspiring singer who becomes a hero to the poor after killing a police officer. The film, cowritten with director Perry Henzell, was drawn from the story of a Jamaican criminal killed by police in 1948.

For many American audience members, the film was their first view of urban Jamaican life and culture. It featured reggae by Cliff, who sings the title song, Toots and the Maytals, Desmond Dekker, and others and remained an art-house staple in the United States for several years after its release. It also broke Jamaica's box-office records but did not enrich Mr. Rhone.

"It made money for somebody, I would imagine," he told the New York Times. "Not me."

Mr. Rhone's plays often used satire to comment on the social conflicts in Jamaica after its independence from England in 1962.

His first major work, Smile Orange (1971), showed the tourism trade through the eyes of underpaid hotel clerks and waiters at a Montego Bay resort. Although a comedy, the play conveys a bleak message that the exploitative nature of the tourism trade had led to racial self-hatred and malicious behavior. In one memorable scene, a clerk uses his spit and a discarded banana peel to polish the silverware.

Mr. Rhone directed a 1976 film version of Smile Orange that received friendly reviews. He continued to write a series of popular plays, including School's Out (1974), based on his experiences as a teacher in the 1960s. It concerned a missionary school whose academic standards had declined dramatically. An overflowing toilet that no one will fix and an absent headmaster, represented by an unopened office door, were viewed as symbols of national dysfunction.

Writing in the Times of London, theater critic Irving Wardle praised Mr. Rhone's "gifts for loving characterization and powers of storytelling."