05.05.05
The Harder They Come (1972)

The plot is right out of a 1930’s Warner Brothers musical: a country boy comes to the big city to seek fame and fortune. In this case the boy is Ivan Martin (Jimmy Cliff) who comes to the slums of Kingston after his Grandmother’s death to see his estranged mother, who has no use for him. “How you going to live?” she asks “I could make a record.” he replies.

He ends up working as a handyman for a somewhat shady minister, and developing a relationship with the Elsa, the minister’s ward, while he begs the studio bosses for a chance to cut a demo. He finally gets his chance, but is outraged when he’s offered only $20 for all of the rights to his recording. He tries to shop it around to radio stations and dancehall DJ’s on his own, but soon finds out just how far-reaching the music industry’s influence is. Eventually he sells his demo back to the studio, takes the $20 and is blacklisted for his troubles. Shortly thereafter, the preacher turns him out after discovering his relationship with Elsa (the minister seems to have is own designs on her) and he starts dealing drugs. After a run in with the corrupt police force that leaves a policeman dead, he becomes an outlaw hero- and his record suddenly starts selling.

This was the first feature film to come out of Jamaica, and in many parts it plays like an anti-travelogue: advertisements for luxury items from the United States and posh resorts for white tourists are contrasted with sprawling dumps and homeless population of Kingston. The soundtrack went on to become even more popular than the movie, and is a wonderful sampler of ska, rocksteady and roots reggae, and includes cuts by Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff and Toots and the Maytals (who appear briefly as themselves, in the recording studio for “Sweet and Dandy”.)

It also has my all-time favorite montage sequence- impressed by his new outlaw status, Ivan strong-arms a photographer into taking his portrait, Bonnie and Clyde style, to send to the newspapers, while he poses with a pair of handguns to Desmond Dekker’s “007(Shantytown)”. Shortly thereafter he will go down in a blaze of glory.