The Harder They Come

Jimmy Cliff, Kingston crime, and the Island reggae soundtrack

The Harder They Come is a crime story that travels on songs. Perry Henzell’s 1972 Jamaican film, written with Trevor Rhone, turns the outlaw legend of Rhyging into a looser fiction Jimmy Cliff can wear: Ivanhoe Martin, a country boy who arrives in Kingston with a tune in his head and no intention of staying poor. Cliff already had hits; he did not want the job until Henzell told him he was a better actor than a singer. During the shoot, while the picture was still called Hard Road to Travel, Cliff wrote the title song in a night. Henzell heard it the next morning and renamed the film. That hurry is in the soundtrack as well as in the plot.

The story is simple and mean. Ivan records a tune, a producer pays him almost nothing, the city offers ganja and a gun, and the newspapers turn a cornered man into a star. The colors are Kingston heat, not tourist postcard. Patois stays in the mouths of the people who speak it; American prints carried subtitles. That was awkward for the island, and it also meant the film did not sand its speech down for export. Cliff’s Ivan is vain, funny, scared, and convinced a record is a kind of passport. The film neither crowns him nor scolds him. It watches an industry that uses both the song and the death.

Music does not decorate that arc; it drives it. The Island soundtrack gathered Cliff’s You Can Get It If You Really Want, Many Rivers to Cross, Sitting in Limbo, and The Harder They Come beside Toots and the Maytals’ Pressure Drop, the Melodians’ Rivers of Babylon, and the Slickers’ Johnny Too Bad. For a great many listeners outside Jamaica, reggae began as this sequence, not as a genre lecture. The album wandered into dorms and midnight shows and made the film a repeat ticket before the charts had a neat shelf for it. Songs comment on ambition, faith, pressure, and outlaw cool while Ivan chases the same myths the radio is selling.