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
