In Jamaica In 1972: Hero Cyan Dead

Thirty years ago the cult film The Harder They Come burst out of Jamaica. Tony Keily looks at this witty, vivid and often shocking representation of 'sufferah' society, which came equipped with an soundtrack that blew a hole in stereos across the world. [Extract]

Too black, too strong
The Harder They Come is literally a singular film. Certainly nothing like it has ever come out of Jamaica since. Perry Henzell has never again directed. Its star Jimmy Cliff has never equalled his screen evocation of the sufferah Ivan. The whole thing was a cinematic one-off in a country with little filmmaking tradition. It appeared out of nowhere and was seen almost everywhere.

But when Perry Henzell completed the film back in 1972, he wasn't sure he wanted it shown outside of his island home, and for six months it was screened only there. Henzell had been the film critic for the Kingston daily The Gleaner and made THTC specifically for the patrons of the Carib Theatre in downtown Kingston, where his work brought him three times a week. "You have to make a film for a particular audience. If you're going to take an audience and control its emotions for two hours, you have to know how they are going to react... You can't just say you're going to reach everyone."

Henzell felt that on another level he had made his film 'for slum-dwellers everywhere'. Indeed, the perceived threat of this underclass-oriented cinema led to a ban on the release of the film in Brazil. It was also predicted that, apart from its politics, the cultural specificity of the film which made it dear to the Carib audience - its unfiltered and sometimes brutal portrayal of Jamaican 'sufferah' life - would be a bar to its wider release. "Everybody had told me not to make it too 'Jamaican'" And initially it looked like the film, even with subtitles to make sufferah English accessible, would not travel. THTC had its first official extra-Jamaican screening at the Cork Film Festival, where, according to Henzell, "There wasn't a cough, there wasn't a laugh, nothing!"

Henzell then headed for Brixton, where the film would surely find sympathetic favour. Wrong. Its opening night drew half a dozen viewers. The local Jamaican paper regarded this film about illiterate gangsters as an embarrassment to the home country. Although it was not explicitly stated at the time, there was something else about THTC that might embarrass such opinion, and was certainly even too 'Jamaican' for many Jamaicans. Jimmy Cliff was (and is) black. Not brown. Not sallow. He was a black man. In Jamaica black was not supposed to be visible, even though the majority of the population was dark-skinned. The beauty queens and the politicians were light-skinned, in accordance with a insidious caste system inherited from colonialism that had wormed its way into the national psyche. Marginalisation and dark skin went together. Rasta culture, taking hold among the Jamaican underclass at the time THTC was made (although few if any of its actors are 'locksed'), directly resisted this ingrown self-hate. American Black Power also made a contribution. Consequently it was almost acceptable that PM Michael Manley should have a dark-skinned wife, one of the first black faces in Jamaican public life. Beverly Manley was in fact Perry Henzell's secretary previous to her marriage and appears as the wealthy housewife in THTC. But blackness was still a Jamaican problem, and has remained so.
Back to Brixton. Henzell was not content to have his film buried easily. He got a few locals together, and for one day met every incoming tube with a flier announcing the film and its Jamaican success. That night the cinema was three-quarters full. From then on it was full houses. Although the English press generally and nervously stayed away, Observer critic George Melly cycled to Brixton to catch the film and gave it a rave review. And so commenced a thrity-year cult following.

Walking Tall
The seed of the undertaking arrived in a moment of insight that hit Henzell in Miami international airport, a place so busy and aggressive in the early 70s that it was no easy feat to get noticed. Suddenly the director saw a group of youths striding down the main concourse "and they weren't intimidated ... far from it - Miami airport was turning and looking at them. They were walking tall." They were young Jamaicans, and Henzell had a film. His story would be simple: a 'country bwoy' would hit the city and learn its rules the hard way. He'd try to make it as a singer, but soon realize that the gun is what earns you quick money and respect. Ironically his subsequent notoriety as a cop killer pushes his debut single up the playing lists until he is the most wanted man and voice in Jamaica. The idea of casting Jimmy Cliff came in another epiphanic moment as Henzell was perusing album cover shots in which the young singer managed to look cool and at the same time to graphically manifest something of the sufferah spirit.
These two insights can be linked to crucial elements in Henzell's approach to cinema. One element is his use of found, ready-made people:"'I'm not looking for someone to do what I tell them to do. I'm looking for somebody who brings a particular spirit to a role, and because they carry that spirit to the role, they know actually more about it than I do." Jimmy could play Ivan because Ivan's rural background and musical ambitions mirrored his own. It took work, though, to bring all this out. Cliff turned up to early rehearsals with a star attitude and a faux cockney accent. Henzell presented him with an ultimatum: "Tell me something...if you get this wrong, do you think you're going to be able to come back to Jamaica?" From that point Jimmy became Ivan.

Another essential element in Henzell's directing was the creation of a real drama in the production space, a drama which could then be filmed. "Basically there are two kinds of filmmakers. There's the filmmaker who brings the action to the camera and there's the filmmaker who takes the camera to the action. I take the camera to the action... The kind of scene that I revel in is a group of musicians recording and a cameraman catching it. That's my idea of the best way to shoot a scene." And despite its sparse plotting, minimal dialogue and slightly head-on, here-it-is photography, THTC has a mesmeric quality that haunts the viewer for hours or even days after its screening. That's because a unusual type of confusion of screen realities is achieved, resulting from the capturing of action moulded out of the lives and language of its actors. As music writer Lloyd Bradley puts it, 'you could smell the rubbish in the street and feel the heat of the sun'.

The full text of this article is printed in Film Ireland 91