The Harder They Come

Another of the movies that I got the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends is The Harder They Come. It's got another airing coming up, tomorrow at 12:45 PM on SHOxBET, followed by a few showings on Flix some days later.

Jimmy Cliff, best known as a reggae singer, plays Ivanhoe Martin, nicknamed Ivan, a young man from the Jamaican countryside who takes the bus to Kingston to look for his mother, as Grandma has died and left Mom some money. Kingston being the "big city", it's a stereotypically dangerous place, and Ivan gets fleeced almost immediately upon his arrival. Mom is distressed by the death of her mother, but doesn't have any room in the shanty she calls home to put up Ivan, so he's going to have to find a place of his own and figure out some way to make money.

Ivan has dreams of making it as a singer, and even has a song he wrote, but breaking in to the music business isn't easy. Eventually, Ivan finds a job in some sort of machine shop which seems to be run by a local preacher (Basil Keane) who has a congregation with a pretty good choir. The preacher has a foster daughter in Elsa (Janet Bartley) who is an adult now, and there's some insinuation made that perhaps she should become the preacher's wife.

Eventually, Ivan is able to get some illicit practice in at the church hall, which enrages the preacher, and after some struggle is able to cut his record for Hilton (Bob Charlton), the big record producer. Unfortunately, when I say Hilton is the big record producer, he's really the only record producer, having all of the big DJs in his stable and being able to control what gets played and what doesn't. He uses this to underpay the musicians, since if they demand more he'll simply make certain their record don't get any air time.

So, even though Ivan's song is a hit, he's not able to profit from it and has to turn to another career, which in Jamaica means ganja and other drugs. One of the cops, Ray Jones (Winston Stona) kinda sorta manages it, or at least looks the other way just enough to make certain that it doesn't lead to too much violence. He's got the power to get anyone who gets too big arrested, but he also doesn't want the army to come in and deal with it as they'd be like a bull in a china shop.

Ivan, unfortunately, does get too big, to the point where he becomes a sort of folk hero to the people at the bottom of the economic ladder. However, he also shoots a motorcycle cop who comes after him, leading to his ultimate downfall....

The Harder They Come is a movie that in many was is a very simple and old story. The small-town boy goes to the big city to try to make it big, only to find out that the city streets are not paved with gold and life is not a bed of roses. It's the sort of storyline that Hollywood churned out during the Depression. The change of scenery, however, does the story a world of good.

Thanks to the small budget, there are some issues with the story and the acting. (The woman playing Ivan's mother, for example, way overacts when she finds out her mom died.) But there's also an immediacy to the proceedings, with everything being far more real than anything Hollywood could ever have produced. That, and the movie is rather more forthright in its dealings with issues like police corruption and the not always virtuous clergy. It's right up there with Salaam Bombay! in that regard.

The music, of course, is another highlight. I'm not a particular fan or reggae, but Jimmy Cliff brings a lot of energy to the songs he sings, with some other interesting stuff as well.

One other thing to note is that the print I recorded was subtitled. The film is nominally in English, although it might be more accurate to say that the dialogue falls in a spectrum running from standard Jamaican English to Jamaican Patwa. I definitely picked up on the grammatical differences between Patwa and English, although I didn't pick up on words of African origin that the Wikipedia article says Patwa has more than standard Jamaican English. (Note that this article says there's more of a continuum from Jamaican English to Patwa than two fully separate languages.) In any case, there were parts of the movie where I would have had no difficulty understanding the dialogue even without subtitles, and times where the subtitles were definitely a help.

The Harder They Come is available on DVD and Blu-ray. It's a movie that I can definitely recommend.