Old Yorker

  • The Harder They Come

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Perry Henzell (1972)

    Among the reggae tracks playing in NFT3 before the screening was Desmond Dekker’s ‘Israelites’, whose lyrics include the line ‘I don’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde’.  That is almost how Ivanhoe (Ivan) Martin, the protagonist of the Jamaican film The Harder They Come, ends up.  When his dreams of becoming a pop star are thwarted Ivan (Jimmy Cliff) gets involved in marijuana running.  Threatened with arrest, he shoots and kills one police officer, then three more, then goes after José (Carl Bradshaw), the man who recruited him to the drugs-running network (and who Ivan thinks shopped him).  They hare down a street with Ivan firing at José, José running for his life and a pack of kids excitedly joining in the chase.  Ivan’s crimes give him the public profile denied him as a singer.  He was ripped off by the record-producer mogul Hilton (Bob Charlton) who now releases Ivan’s song, ‘The Harder They Come’, to cash in on his notoriety, while Ivan poses for photographs as a two-gun-toting outlaw.  He forces the photographer at gunpoint to develop the pictures immediately; while that’s happening, another man comes in, recognises Ivan and asks for his autograph.  After a failed attempt to escape from Jamaica to Cuba, Ivan is eventually ambushed by police with automatic rifles; he faces them, brandishing his own weapons, and is shot dead.  This ending of Perry Henzell’s film is more sudden than that of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).  As soon as Ivan falls to the ground, Henzell cuts to black then to the closing credits, accompanied by the title song.

    The film has its place in cinema history as the first full-length feature shot in Jamaica by a Jamaican director and with a Jamaican cast – though it needs noting that Perry Henzell was, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book Midnight Movies (1983), ‘a white, blond Jamaican who grew up on his father’s 22,000-acre plantation, went to school in England, and made 300 TV commercials (along with BBC dramas) before embarking on the first reggae musical’.  That first was important, too:  a Los Angeles Times obituary for Henzell, who died in 2006, claimed that The Harder They Come ‘introduced reggae music to an international audience’.  The title song was the only one of the main numbers written for the film – by Jimmy Cliff, already internationally successful thanks to his cover of Cat Stevens’s ‘Wild World’ and, as a singer-songwriter, hits like ‘Wonderful World, Beautiful People’, ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ and ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’.  The last two-named both feature on the soundtrack of The Harder They Come.

    Henzell, who raised finance from local businessmen to make the film, also produced and co-wrote the screenplay with Trevor D Rhone.  The Harder They Come captures in semi-documentary style major features of contemporary national life – poverty, church, music, ganja, guns – in Kingston and rural Jamaica.  (Ivan comes to the big city after the death of his grandmother, with whom he lived in the country; he returns there when he goes into hiding.)  Movies and their influence are another important element.  In an early scene, Ivan is part of the young audience lapping up Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Western Django (1966) in a Kingston picture house.  Moments before Ivan’s own death, his mind flashes back to Django and the eponymous hero’s machine-gunning down a horde of antagonists.  A doomed man on the run, Ivan also has a kinship with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s anti-hero in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960).  As the Hollywood Western inspired the Spaghetti Western, so American crime dramas fed Godard’s film-making imagination (and the French New Wave informed Robert Benton and David Newman’s screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde).  These connections enrich The Harder They Come but even mentioning them risks implying that Henzell parades his cinema-history references for the cognoscenti’s benefit.  He doesn’t at all.  The film’s raw dynamism is the opposite of academic.

    Ivan has hardly arrived in Kingston before he’s robbed of all his possessions.  He visits his wastrel mother (Lucia White), from whom he’s been estranged; when he tries and fails to find work, it’s she who puts him in touch with a local preacher (Basil Keane), who employs Ivan as an odd job man.  Ivan also takes a fancy to Elsa (Janet Bartley), the preacher’s devout, demure ward, and repairs a broken-down bicycle to use to run errands.  When he persuades Elsa to give him the keys to the church and rehearses his secular songs there, the preacher throws him out.  Ivan later returns to collect his bicycle only to find it’s been appropriated by another man, whom he challenges.  His adversary threatens him with a broken bottle and Ivan retaliates by slashing him with a knife.  Although he’s spared a custodial sentence, his punishment is ten lashes with a whip across his bare backside.  The episodic narrative then moves on to his attempts to interest Hilton, who monopolises the local music industry through payola, in his songs.

    The Harder They Come is stronger in its more documentary aspects, and when Jimmy Cliff sings, than in conventional dramatic storytelling.  Ivan’s motivation for staying with Elsa for as long as he does isn’t clear, except in order to – in their climactic exchange – deride Elsa’s Christian hope for happiness in the hereafter and assert his own determination to succeed in the here and now.  His signature song, though, has already made that plain:

    ‘Well, they tell me of a pie up in the sky
    Waiting for me when I die
    But between the day you’re born and when you die
    They never seem to hear even your cry

    So as sure as the sun will shine
    I’m gonna get my share now, what’s mine
    And then the harder they come
    The harder they fall, one and all …’

    There are times in the last part of the story when Ivan threatens to become less an individual than a warning example within Jamaican culture of wanting to make it at all costs.  Yet Jimmy Cliff, who gives him a beguiling blend of insolence and urgent self-belief, ensures the character’s transitions are more persuasive than they might be, as well as involving.  His performance makes you sorry that, over the course of his long, successful music career, Cliff has done so little acting subsequently.

    The film features a cameo from another legend of Jamaican music, the seminal Prince Buster.  He appears as the club DJ who introduces Ivan’s song and mistakenly calls it ‘The Harder They Fall’ – the title also of Jeymes Samuel’s Western, released last year, on the eve of The Harder They Come‘s half century.  I recall reading about Perry Henzell’s film on its original release, when I was still at school.  I’d never got round to seeing it until now.  Better late than never, though – much better when the piece of work is as variously remarkable as this one.

    9 August 2022

  • Paris, Texas

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Wim Wenders (1984)

    Wim Wenders’s famous film means a lot to plenty of cineastes and, perhaps, to plenty of people who feel it speaks to their personal experience of separation and loss.  Shot by Wenders’s frequent collaborator Robby Müller, Paris, Texas is often visually impressive.  On the soundtrack, Ry Cooder’s guitar music is almost invasively effective.  Harry Dean Stanton, in his first lead role at the age of fifty-eight, gives a fine performance.  Yet I found the film unmoving and increasingly artificial – arty-ficial may be a better word.

    From the start of his cinema career, Wenders showed a penchant for road movies.  His first six features include Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976), now known as his ‘Road Movie Trilogy’.  The last of those three films includes the much-quoted line ‘The Americans have colonised our unconscious’, and Wenders’s fascination with the mythic power of American popular culture was a recurring theme in his work.  The Road Movie Trilogy pictures are set, mostly or wholly, in West Germany, which enables Wenders to show American cultural osmosis at work in his native land as well as in his film-making.  When America is the setting, as it is in Paris, Texas, the effect is inevitably different.  The title, although it’s the name of a real place, implies confusion between continental Europe and the US:  mentions of Paris in the film, written by Sam Shepard and L M Kit Carson, usually involve a character’s mistakenly assuming a reference to the French capital.  The director’s intrigued outsider’s eye promises to complement and enlarge this cultural collision but Wenders’s aestheticising European perspective so dominates that he alienises America – from Texas to California, where a good part of the action takes place.  Even allowing that estrangement is central to the story, the people in it come across as unreal strangers in a strange land.

    The best part of the film is the start, when the distinctive imagery is still a novelty.  The protagonist, Travis Henderson (Stanton), walking alone in the vastness of the West Texas desert, cuts an extraordinary (and memorable) figure in his shabby suit and tie, topped off with a red baseball cap.  Although he’s thirsty and tired, Travis walks with purpose until he stumbles into an isolated bar, where he collapses.  A doctor who examines Travis can’t get a word out of him but finds a telephone number in his pocket, and calls it.  The call is answered, in Los Angeles, by Walt Henderson (Dean Stockwell), Travis’s younger brother.  Travis has been missing for four years, presumed dead by Walt and his wife Anne (Aurore Clément).  Walt sets off immediately for Texas.  He arrives to learn from his brother’s doctor (Bernhard Wicki) that Travis has wandered off from the clinic where he was treated.  Walt, in his hired car, tracks him down.

    The early scenes between Travis and Walt work well.  Travis remains mute and his oddness plays against the relative normality of Walt, increasingly exasperated by his brother’s silence.  It’s a highlight when Walt, after crossly asking how long he’s going to keep the act up, carries on chuntering and doesn’t catch Travis’s first word, which arrives about half an hour into the film.  The word is Paris.  Travis shows Walt a photo of what’s apparently waste ground – a piece of land in Paris, Texas that he purchased, believing he was conceived in the town.  This is where Travis says he wants to go.  Instead, after a couple of false starts, he and Walt head back to the latter’s home.  Following Travis’s disappearance and that of his estranged wife Jane, Walt and Anne took over the care of Hunter (Hunter Carson), Jane and Travis’s only child.  Now seven years old, Hunter remembers little of his birth parents.  He treats Anne and Walt as, and calls them, mom and dad.

    Once Travis joins the household, he and Hunter soon develop a strong bond.  Anne tells Travis that Jane has recently been in touch:  Hunter’s mother, says Anne, travels to Houston, Texas on the same date each month to make a deposit in a bank account for her son.  Travis determines to see Jane again; he gets money (from Walt) to buy a car so that he can drive to Houston in time for Jane’s next visit.  He tells Hunter that he’s leaving Los Angeles, the boy wants to go with Travis and they set off on the road together without further ado.  When they eventually arrive in Houston, Hunter, who has seen home movies in which his mother appears, recognises Jane (Nastassja Kinski) leaving the bank.  He and Travis follow her car to Jane’s place of work – a club where male clients sit in booths partitioned by one-way mirrors and equipped with phones; the club’s strippers, of whom Jane is one, sit on the dark side of the mirror showing clients whatever they ask to see.  Travis wants only to talk to Jane and avoids looking in the mirror.  Puzzled by the halting conversation, she starts to remove her top but Travis tells her to stop.  After talking for a while more, he glimpses her and leaves.

    Paris, Texas clearly isn’t aiming for thoroughgoing realism but it nevertheless depends on the credibility and motivation of its characters.  If you don’t believe, on a realistic level, what they’re doing, it distances you from the people on the screen and gives increased salience to other aspects of what you’re watching.  Harry Dean Stanton is beautifully expressive, especially in his eyes and his movement, but you admire the actor without being absorbed by the man – or, rather, the conception – that he’s playing.  The best acting in the film after Stanton’s comes from Dean Stockwell but he has a frustrating role.  Walt runs a company designing and posting billboard material in the Hollywood area.  This symbolic line of work is a means to an end – a dialogue between Walt and Travis on a high platform in front of the billboard and its latest advertisement, which dwarfs them both.  When Travis and Hunter disappear to Houston, Walt and his wife virtually disappear from the film; they’re not seen again after learning through a phone call that Hunter is with Travis.  Because the story’s destination requires that a father and son go in search of the one’s wife and the other’s mother, the distress of the abandoned Walt and Anne, who have no children of their own, counts for nothing.

    The West Texas desert at the start is the most under-populated location but almost everywhere else in the America of this film is short of human beings – and particularly of Americans.  The doctor who first looks after Travis is played by an Austrian, who speaks heavily accented English.  Even though Aurore Clément really is French, she occasionally suggests an Anglophone actor pretending to be.  Both she and Bernhard Wicki come over as superfluous reminders that Wim Wenders isn’t American either.  Nastassja Kinski, though her face tends to show only what you suspect the director has asked her to show, makes a good job of her Texan drawl but her presence also has the effect of stressing the foreignness of Wenders’s cast.  Hunter Carson stands out for different reasons.  The son of L M Kit Carson and Karen Black, he’s a highly capable child actor but often a knowing one.  It’s hardly his fault, though, that the behaviour of his namesake in the film is particularly hard to accept.  Hunter is believably drawn to Travis as a novelty and because of his father’s eccentric charm.  It’s incredible that the boy never shows any sign of missing his de facto parents or any other part of home, even when Hunter is cooped up alone in a Houston hotel room while Travis returns to the club for a more extended session with Jane.

    By this stage in the film, you remark Wenders’s designs more than you engage with his characters.  When the action moves to Houston, you notice primarily that Travis and Hunter both wear red shirts and Jane drives a red car.  Even in the long second exchange between Travis and Jane, and although Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski compel attention, they’re upstaged by the ingenious camerawork showing their heads and faces in the one-way mirror.  In this, the climax to Paris, Texas, Travis tells the story of his and Jane’s life together and the events that led up to his fugue state at the start of the film.  In doing so, he refers to himself and Jane not in the first and second person but as a man and the much younger woman he married and with whom he had a child.  The woman suffered from post-natal depression; the man, who suspected her of infidelity, became an abusive alcoholic.  One night, in their trailer, he tied her and their child to a stove.  He woke to find their home on fire and his family gone.  Jane now knows whose voice she’s hearing (it’s a wonder she didn’t during Travis’s first monologue) and what he’s talking about.  When Travis tells her that Hunter is in Houston and where, Jane makes her way to the hotel and is reunited with her son.  Seeing them embrace, Travis gets in his car and drives off.  Aficionados of Paris, Texas love this finale for its mythic completeness.  I guess there’s no arguing with that.

    4 August 2022

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