Pressure drop: 'The Harder They Come'

‘The Harder They Come’ is a film of constant challenges and clashes, but it’s a musical at heart

- Uday Bhatia

Watching Bob Marley: One Love last week, I was distracted by a stray mention of Jimmy Cliff. The biopic was already exasperating me with its safety-first approach. I spent the rest of One Love intermittently dreaming of The Harder They Come. Same era, same Jamaican patois, but this 1972 film starring Cliff is as rough and exciting as One Love is polished and inert.

By 1972, Cliff was already a hit artist, with a handful of reggae standards-Many Rivers To Cross, the protest number Vietnam-to his name. Filmmaker Perry Henzell approached him with a script inspired by a gangster named Rhygin, who was a local sens together. Their central character, Ivanhoe, was changed to a musician who takes up the gun. They had a certain type in mind-"an anti-hero in the way that Hollywood turns its bad guys into heroes," Cliff recalled.

The Harder They Come opens with a near-bus collision, albeit a comic one. It's a fitting start, for this is a film of constant disagreements and challenges and clashes. The Jamaica we see is an endless series of shanty towns, where corrupt cops receive cutbacks from marijuana traders and all but a select few live in grinding poverty. Into this comes Ivan, a young man from the country. He's a singer with no money or belongings, a hair-trigger temper and a taste for expensive toys.