The Harder They Come (1972)
(On Cable TV, August 2022) Many movies can be said to be atmospheric, but The Harder They Come is in a class of its own. Part of it has to do with rarity—few other films came from Kingston, Jamaica in the early 1970s, and fewer still offered such a compelling blend of street-level drama and music. The film is noteworthy both for cinephiles and music lovers for introducing the world to reggae music, and the terrific soundtrack bears this out, with a number of roots classics peppered throughout. (This is a film that takes a brute-force approach to its soundtrack, though, as it rotates between a few songs over and over again to create, within the span of a single film, the feeling you get from hearing a current hit over and over on Top-40 radio—by the time “Pressure Drop” or You Can Get It If You Really Want.” hits, all reggae fans are like yeaaaah.) The plot and execution are, frankly, messy in the way low-budget independent films often were at the time: The Harder They Come’s production (which reportedly lasted for years) uses whatever is on hand without many refinements, and doesn’t necessarily feature professional actors either. Accordingly, it feels almost refreshingly raw: Its Jamaican production, through director Perry Henzell, gives it that authentic atmosphere we were talking about. It also leads to a plot that would have been a hard sell at any time prior to the New Hollywood era—with a singer-protagonist (the legendary Jimmy Cliff) that regularly resorts to crime (including murder) in order to escape a hardscrabble life and increased police attention. (Cynics will argue that there’s not much of a line between The Harder They Come and more recent efforts such as Get Rich or Die Tryin’.) But for all of its anti-hero, rough execution and soundtrack repetition, The Harder They Come managed to capture something very interesting—the portrait of Kingston in the early 1970s, a life much closer to third-world poverty standards than the glossy image of Caribbean Island living that has been marketed since then.