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http://www.abqtrib.com/albq/fe_movies/article/0,2564,ALBQ_19845_4935652,00.html

The Albuquerque Tribune

The better it gets: Jamaica-set 'The Harder They Come' now on DVD

By BRUCE DANCIS
August 21, 2006

It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of "The Harder They Come," director Perry Henzell's 1972 Jamaican movie starring reggae singer Jimmy Cliff.

It was the first feature film made in Jamaica. The Caribbean nation had been seen before as the affluent backdrop to the exploits of James Bond in "Dr. No," but "The Harder They Come" was the first film to show how the Jamaican underclass lived. In this, it was one of the first films to show Third World poverty.

It introduced reggae music to an international audience. Both in the movie and in the simultaneously released soundtrack album on Island Records, "The Harder They Come" brought the sounds of Cliff (the title track, "You Can Get It If You Really Want," "Many Rivers to Cross," "Sitting in Limbo"), Toots & the Maytals ("Pressure Drop, "Sweet and Dandy"), Desmond Dekker ("007 (Shanty Town)") and others to fans in the United States and elsewhere who had only heard reggae in isolated, one-shot hits such as Dekker's "The Israelites" (1969).

Along with the release one year later of The Wailers' "Catch A Fire," the first album on Island Records by Bob Marley's group, "The Harder They Come" helped establish reggae as a major force in pop music, influencing such artists as the Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder. Reggae quickly became one of the most popular international styles of music and the pioneer of what we now call World beat.

Xenon Records has this week brought out a fine DVD and CD special edition of "The Harder They Come" ($29.98, rated R), with a newly restored, high-definition digital transfer of the movie and its soundtrack. Missing shots are now back in the movie, and the frames of the film have been hand-cleaned, resulting in a picture that looks sharper than ever. The English subtitles, which are often very helpful to American audiences in understanding the thick Jamaican patois of some of the characters, have been rewritten and more clearly printed on the film.

The story, by Henzell and co-writer Trevor Rhone, is based on the legend of Rhygin, a real-life Jamaican outlaw who successfully dodged the police and electrified the island in the 1940s. Cliff plays a modern-day Rhygin, named Ivan, who comes to Kingston from the countryside seeking a better life. He successfully makes a record - the scenes of Cliff recording the title song inside a Kingston recording studio remain electrifying - but is ripped off by the producer. He gets involved with Rastafarians in the ganja trade, which inevitably brings him into conflict with corrupt police officials, and he becomes an outlaw and murderer. He grows in fame as he successfully eludes police capture.

Two documentaries on the DVD put the impact of "The Harder They Come" and its historical importance into perspective. "One and All: The Phenomenon of The Harder They Come" features archival footage, shots from the film and learned commentary from noted reggae writer/radio producer Roger Steffens, former Doors drummer John Densmore and major members of the cast and crew (including Cliff and Henzell) reflecting on the movie. Steffens sees the film as "the major turning point in the history of Jamaican music. It brought a worldwide awareness to this music called reggae."

The other documentary, "Hard Road to Travel: The Making of The Harder They Come," looks at the creative process, the stop-and-start filming of the movie due to the irregularity of securing enough funds to maintain the production, its phenomenal reception in Jamaica and its distribution in Europe and the United States.

Henzell explains how he couldn't get any major Hollywood studio to distribute the film, so he decided to do it himself, taking the film around to colleges and university towns where it built an audience.

Watching "The Harder They Come" again reminded me of how pathbreaking this film truly was when I first saw it in 1973. The music scenes of Cliff and Toots & the Maytals in the recording studio are nothing short of exhilarating, as are the particularly vibrant scenes of singers in a Christian church. The scenes of ganja smoking reminded this reviewer of how startling it was back then to see such images in a movie.

Above everything else, the images of life in the back alleys and rundown shacks of Kingston brought into focus a picture of poverty that had been written about but never before revealed on the motion-picture screen.

4 stars

Rated R

(Bruce Dancis can be reached at bdancis(at)sacbee.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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