Review: Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come on Shout! Factory Blu-ray

The first Jamaican-produced feature film, and still the most famous film to ever to come out of the island nation, Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come doesn’t open with a picturesque vista of a glorious patch of shoreline, but rather a drab, rain-drenched shot of a bus making its way along a winding oceanside road. As the vehicle makes its way through cramped villages and cities clogged with billboard ads, the 1972 film announces itself as a work made by and primarily for Jamaicans. If the island may look like an unspoiled paradise to the Westerners enjoying an all-inclusive stay at a Sandals resort compound, for the characters in The Harder They Come, it’s a place of poverty, corruption, and crime.

And then there’s the music. Indeed, Henzell sees Jamaica as a land of vibrant, bouncy reggae that complements nearly every aspect of the islanders’ lives. Music is everywhere in the film: from sweaty dancehall parties; to raucous, electric guitar-backed choirs in a small Christian church; to the ubiquitous transistor radios bumping Toots and the Maytals’s classic “Pressure Drop.” The Harder They Come was many non-Jamaican viewers’ first introduction to the jaunty, syncopated rhythms of reggae, and even nearly half a century on, it’s easy to see how the film’s rollicking soundtrack helped to elevate this regional music to international fame.

Starring reggae superstar Jimmy Cliff as naif country boy Ivanhoe Martin, who dreams of making it big as a singer in Kingston only to get sucked into the criminal underworld, The Harder They Come uses the music of Cliff and a handful of his rocksteady contemporaries as a pointedly upbeat counterpoint to the film’s tale of destitution and dreams deferred. Despite the jubilance of the soundtrack, Henzell’s vision of the Jamaican music business is bleak, an essentially criminal enterprise dominated by a single imperious record producer, Hilton (Bob Charlton), who makes or breaks artists at his will. Ivanhoe eventually gets the opportunity to record a tune—the rip-roaring title anthem that encapsulates the film’s mood of hardscrabble striving—but it’s buried by Hilton after Ivanhoe rejects his paltry offer for the track.

Having experienced the exploitation of the music business, Ivanhoe turns to transporting marijuana for a crime syndicate. He gradually runs afoul of the police and his fellow traffickers, eventually killing three cops and going on the lam. And after he proceeds to leave spray-painted messages taunting his pursuers, he becomes a nationwide cause célèbre and “The Harder They Comes” is in heavy rotation on radio stations across Jamaica. Ivanhoe’s dreams of stardom finally come true—and all he had to do was resort to murder.

Henzell handles this darkly ironic narrative with a light touch and an emphasis on the matter-of-fact details of everyday life. The Harder They Come may be rough around the edges, with awkward jumps in the narrative and some technically deficient scenes where one can barely even make out what’s happening due to poor lighting or clumsy framing, but Henzell captures images of sensuousness and natural beauty throughout, such as a hypnotic montage of Ivanhoe and his girl, Elsa (Janet Bartley), making love in the ocean.

Like Gordon Parks’s Shaft and Gordon Parks Jr.’s Super Fly, two American blaxploitation films that are similarly remembered today more for their soundtracks than their filmmaking, The Harder They Come exhibits an exciting attempt to merge genre plotting with location shooting and non-professional actors. These works offer a deglamorized but still entertaining view of a black underclass struggling against the limitations of poverty and a police system that seeks to dominate rather than protect them. But don’t mistake them for lectures, as they’re brutally honest attempts to reflect the circumstances of a particular place and time. The Harder They Come’s greatest asset may still be its soundtrack, which makes such a stirring impact because it provides a cathartic release from the grim realities depicted on screen.

Ivanhoe’s fate may be tragic, but what truly sticks with us from The Harder They Come isn’t his death. Rather, it’s his impassioned performance of the title song in the recording studio earlier in the film, which Henzell shows us in full. Decked out in an all-black outfit with a bright yellow Star of David on the front, Ivanhoe sings, “The oppressors are trying to keep me down…[but] as sure as the sun will shine, I’m gonna get my share now of what’s mine.” Ultimately, he doesn’t, but when we hear him sing those words, we believe he will.

Image/Sound

Featuring a new 4K scan of the original 16mm negative, Shout! Factory’s Blu-ray showcases The Harder They Come in all its grainy, gritty glory. The film’s rich color palette—the deep greens of the forest, the bright yellows of Jimmy Cliff’s wardrobe—truly pop without ever seeming oversaturated. Slight imperfections in the original negative, including subtle scratches and flecks of dust, are rightly preserved, emphasizing the film’s scrappy, low-budget origins. The dialogue has always been troublesome for non-Jamaican audiences due to the thick local patois spoken by most of the characters, but the disc’s sharp audio, available in stereo and DTS-HD 5.1, at least reproduce these intricate vocal inflections with maximum fidelity. Naturally, the highlight of the film’s audio design is its bouncy reggae soundtrack, which bursts forth from the speakers with sparkling clarity and a deep bass presence. The film has simply never looked nor, more importantly, sounded so good.

Extras

Shout!’s extraordinarily thorough collector’s edition features a dense array of extras, making it without a doubt the definitive release of this cult film. The highlight of the set is undoubtedly an entire disc devoted to Henzell’s second feature, the never-released No Place Like Home, a biting attack on the touristization of Jamaica’s countryside. Shout! has also provided a feature on the restoration of this lost film, as well as four separate features on Henzell (covering his life and career, his legacy, his home and film production center, and his family). Cliff biographer David Katz provides an incisive, though stiltedly delivered, audio commentary for The Harder They Come, and the package also includes a host of extras devoted to the film, including documentaries on the making of the film, its international success, the cast, and the production crew, as well as a feature providing an in-depth anatomy of three specific scenes. The set is rounded out by archival interviews with Henzell, Cliff, and producer Arthur Gorson, a music video, a TV performance, a new interview with Ridley Scott, and a featurette on the legendary recording facility featured in the film, Dynamic Sound Studios.

Overall

This three-disc package not only showcases the film in all its audio-visual glory, but also provides a comprehensive look at Perry Henzell’s life and career.