Kingston in full color
Ivanhoe Martin arrives in Kingston with a song in his head and no intention of staying poor. Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come, written with Trevor Rhone and released in Jamaica in 1972, loosens the outline of the outlaw Rhyging into a fiction Jimmy Cliff can wear. Cliff, already a star with hits behind him, did not want the job. Henzell told him he was a better actor than a singer. Cliff, who had wanted to act since school, said yes. During the shoot, while the picture was still called Hard Road to Travel, he wrote the title song in a night. Henzell heard it the next morning and changed the name of the film.
The story is simple and mean. A country boy records a tune, a producer pays him nothing, the city offers ganja and a gun, and the newspapers turn a cornered man into a star. The colors are not decorative. They are how Kingston looks when the camera stops apologizing for heat. Patois stays in the mouths of the people who speak it. American prints would carry subtitles, which is a small humiliation and a large gift: the island did not translate itself down. Cliff’s Ivan is vain, funny, scared, and convinced that a record is a kind of passport. The film neither crowns him nor scolds him. It watches the machine that needs both the song and the corpse.
The soundtrack, gathered for Island, did the traveling the character dreams of. Cliff’s You Can Get It If You Really Want, Many Rivers to Cross, Sitting in Limbo and The Harder They Come sit beside Toots and the Maytals’ Pressure Drop, the Melodians’ Rivers of Babylon, the Slickers’ Johnny Too Bad. Reggae, for a great many listeners outside Jamaica, began as this sequence, not as a genre lecture. The album wandered into dorms and midnight shows and made the film a cult before the charts had a shelf for it. Variety, in 1972, heard a sharp rhythm and a social theme wearing the clothes of a familiar tale. That is exactly the cut.
It has a sharp and racy rhythm, in keeping with the syncopated music of the isle, plus an underlying social theme in the guise of a familiar tale.
(Variety, 1972)
In the United States the picture became a midnight movie, the kind of run that builds a congregation rather than a weekend. People came back for the songs and stayed for the insult at the center: a music industry that buys a voice cheap and sells the myth dear. Cliff’s performance is open-faced. He lets Ivan enjoy the poster of himself. Henzell, who knew the island as a native and not as a backdrop, refuses the postcard. The motorcycles, the sea light, the church, the recording shack, all belong to a working city. Cult, here, does not mean obscure. It means a film that kept its audience by being specific.
Later reggae films, documentaries, and Bob Marley’s global fame can make The Harder They Come look like a preface. It is not a preface. It is a complete object: a crime story, a musical, a map of Kingston, and a warning about what happens when a song is the only property a man is allowed to own. Cliff wrote the chorus while the cameras were already up. You can still hear the hurry in it, and the hurry is the point. The harder they come, the song says, and the picture does not blink.
