The Harder They Come

 

 

THE HARDER THEY COME         B+                                                                                   Jamaica  (120 mi)  1972  d:  Perry Henzell

When the film was first released in American theaters no one saw it, gaining popularity on the midnight circuit, playing for several years to largely white audiences, mostly students, developing a cult status, then disappearing from sight altogether for several decades even as the music became wildly popular, actually preceding the popularity of reggae giant Bob Marley, whose albums caught fire a year later.  While Jimmy Cliff was never the performer nor the legend that Bob Marley was, but he did get a fictionalized film made at the peak of his career where he was the star, turning into a Blaxploitation flick, an outlaw on the run movie where people would get high just to watch the stunning real locations in Jamaica and hear the gorgeous musical soundtrack, which helped introduce reggae not only to America but around the world, remaining one of the best concept albums in movie history, where the soundtrack may actually be better than the movie.  In this sense it resembles the Marcel Camus film BLACK ORPHEUS (1959) which similarly introduced Brazil’s samba music and Carnaval to the international stage, beautifully intermixing the music’s sensuality into the film’s broader themes.  The first Jamaican-produced feature film, among the biggest thrills is watching Toots and the Maytals do a soulful live recording in a studio before anyone knew who they were, singing “Sweet and Dandy,” The Harder They Come (1972) - Clip: Sweet And Dandy ... YouTube (3:14) with a starry-eyed Jimmy Cliff standing there watching.  Loosely based on the life of Vincent “Ivanhoe” Martin, aka Rhyging, an escaped jailbird that wreaked havoc as a legendary outlaw and folk hero in the late 40’s, committing a string of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) robberies and murders in Kingston, described as the “original rude boy,” displaying unmistakable swagger, sending taunting letters to the press and a “must see” photograph of himself holding guns, eventually gunned down in true gangster fashion, becoming mythologized in Jamaican movies, turned into a folk hero for the poverty-stricken residents of the Jamaican ghettos, acquiring an anti-hero persona, The Slickers - Johnny Too Bad, 1970 - YouTube (3:01).  That’s basically an outline for the low-budget film, shot on 16mm for just $200,000, using a social realist style with non-professional actors, offering a realistic portrayal of Jamaica even as it glamorizes gangsters and underrepresents women, but it doesn’t shy away from the horrific lack of economic opportunities, where corruption infects every aspect of society, including the music business, the ganja trade, the police, and the government.   Jimmy Cliff as Ivan is a rural Jamaican musician who comes to the city with big dreams, also news of his grandmother’s death, supposedly bringing a mango for his mother, but all his belongings are stolen within minutes of his arrival in Kingston, leaving him destitute, sleeping on the street, deprived of work opportunities with no previous experience, eventually finding his way to a morally righteous Preacher (Basil Keane), doing menial work, running errands, singing in the choir, but his real focus is on Elsa (Janet Bartley), the Preacher’s devoutly religious ward who is also blossoming into a beautiful woman.  Assembling a bicycle out of scrap parts, he takes her for a ride along a narrow causeway surrounded by water, heavily romanticized with sensuously photographed oceanside views (an idyllic setting that is later revealed to be an immense dump site), incurring the wrath of the Preacher upon their return for expressing an interest.    

Ivan operates by his own rules, asserting his own independence, which pits him in conflict with the Preacher, as he doesn’t embrace the church’s way of life, and Mr. Hilton (Bob Charlton), the all-powerful record producer who controls the entire distribution process, as records don’t get played on the radio without his consent, with music suppliers only dealing with him, so there are no independent producers, while also butting heads with the police, who are paid-off by the government to look the other way on local drug trafficking, with police collecting their share of the ganja trade, cutting into the profits of local farmers and dealers, where the entire process exploits the poor, who end up paying protection money, with the government embracing the role of mafia kingpins.  Ivan’s initiation into the Jamaican business world mirrors Jamaica’s newly gained independence from Great Britain in 1962, both seeking to establish their own path into newly discovered freedoms.  With huge discrepancies between rich and poor, Jamaican society is divided by major class differences, with Ivan becoming a stand-in for the poor, revealing there’s no easy path out of poverty, with obstacles in place that are designed to frustrate anyone’s aspirations and maintain the status quo.  With no white presence to speak of, different characters in the film come to represent various aspects of Jamaican society, where Ivan’s pursuit of a music career is immediately thwarted by those running the industry, with Hilton paying him a meager $20 for recording a hit record, Jimmy Cliff Recording The Harder They Come In Studio Session YouTube (3:35), effectively devaluing the worth of the creative artists themselves, who are completely reliant upon Hilton for any hopes of success.  Similarly, with cops controlling the ganja trade, small market operators have little hopes of elevating their economic status, as authoritative powers basically control the industry, with small-time operators despising the built-in payoff system that keeps them poor, but if they don’t pay it they immediately get arrested.  Like Odysseus on his epic journey, Ivan makes his way through Kingston’s economic land mines by continually asking “Who’s makin’ all the money?,” in search of justice not only for himself but for others in similar circumstances.  Curiously, much of the film is subtitled (the first English language film requiring subtitles in the USA), representing the Jamaican Patois language spoken by Ivan and most of the street characters, which is largely incomprehensible to American audiences (distinctly different than the Standard English spoken by the rich), yet uniquely associated with Jamaica, gaining considerable popularity in reggae music lyrics, retaining a connection to the island’s historical roots to the African slave trade, providing a sense of identity and solidarity amongst the lower class island residents, with reggae defined as a working-class milieu, with the film offering an uncompromising view of shanty town poverty.  The film director Perry Henzell was born into white privilege, raised on his family’s sugarcane plantation and sent to British boarding school, but at an early age he had experiences with local Rastafarians, developing a curious interest that led to the making of this film.   

The film highlights the importance of the Jamaican dancehall, the place where music is born, as the setting is jovial and upbeat, almost celebratory, where dance music is such a significant aspect of the culture.  It’s a place where people leave their problems behind and just have fun, with Ivan mingling anonymously among the crowd as they’re playing his music.  The religious church services express a similar extreme, with parishioners singing joyously, some “touched” by the spirit of the gospel, with music and religion seemingly clashing with one another.  The Preacher’s overt jealousy drives Elsa away, violently accusing her of “fornication,” leaving her emotionally devastated, as she placed her complete trust in his authority, so she runs away with Ivan, who is equally shattered by his musical experience, where even making a hit record puts no money in his pocket.  So he turns to Jose (Carl Bradshaw), one of the first people he met in Kingston, who sets him up running ganja from the country to the city, which is no different than the music industry, as both are defined by poor pay.  When he becomes aware of Jose’s collusion with the police, Jose considers him a troublemaker, asking too many questions, setting him up on his next operation where he’s flagged down by a cop, but rather than be arrested, he shoots the cop.  He ends up killing more cops after they surround him in a shanty hideaway (having sex with Jose’s girlfriend), angrily chasing Jose out of the neighborhood afterwards, believing he was set up, but this also eliminates the police protection payoffs (at least temporarily), with Ivan becoming a local folk hero.  Notoriously making all the headlines, his music played round the clock, he’s launched into the precarious position of becoming an iconic gangster star overnight, leaving cryptic graffiti messages all around town reading “I was here but I disappear,” or “I am everywhere.”  Sending photos to the newspapers waving six-shooters, this only enhances his legendary rebel status, though his lone act of liberation is stealing a white Cadillac and driving it all over a carefully manicured golf course.  The police trace him to his country hideout, leading to a bloody shoot-out, with Ivan taking a slug to the shoulder, taking refuge deeper into the mountains, befriended by one of the growers, Pedro (Ras Daniel Hartman, a well-known artist and sculptor, the first Rasta to ever appear in a feature film), who becomes his most trusted friend.  Rastas are black nationalists that trace their roots to the slavery era, with Bob Marley introducing Rastafarian themes in his music, viewing themselves as African exiles living in Babylon, a term for Western society dominated by whites, The Melodians - Rivers Of Babylon - 1970 - YouTube (4:19), with Rastas viewed as sacred figures, morally devout, heavily involved in ganga production and consumption, living on the outskirts of society.  It’s all part of Ivan’s epic journey through various levels of Jamaican society, a microcosm of Third World neocolonial exploitation, leading only to dead-ends, layered in subversive music that is perfectly integrated into the storyline, with Jamaican residents enthralled by the film, becoming their highest grossing box-office hit, emulating the lone individual in the Wild West genre, espousing a male-dominated macho domain where only the mythical legend lives on through the poetic musical refrains, “I’d rather be a free man in my grave/Than living as a puppet or a slave.”

Targets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TARGETS                    C+                                                                                                          USA  (90 mi)  1968  d:  Peter Bogdanovich                         

Targets are people…and you could be one of them!                                                             —Tagline for the film

Peter Bogdanovich, like the young French New Wavers from Cahiers du Cinéma before him, was first a film critic and historian, taking an interest in recorded interviews with earlier directors in the twilight of their careers, exactly how he was portrayed in the unfinished final film by Orson Welles, The Other Side of the Wind (2018), where he was affectionately known as “the human tape recorder.”  Writing articles for Esquire in the early 60’s while curating film programs at MOMA that showcased early American film pioneers, he moved to Los Angeles in the mid 60’s and began a collaboration with renegade director/producer Roger Corman, as did many other young American directors at the time, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Monte Hellman, Jonathan Demme and John Sayles, finding himself working on the biker flick THE WILD ANGELS (1966) with Peter Fonda, a surprise hit, grossing over $15 million dollars in 1966, which was 15^th overall at the box office that year, where he’s an uncredited writer, cinematographer, and editor, while also working as an extra and assistant director.  In his essay on this film, Targets | New Beverly Cinema, Quentin Tarantino best describes Corman’s unorthodox working methods, cannibalizing existing footage from one film and putting it in another, surrounding it with newly shot material, essentially churning out an assembly line low-budget style of moviemaking that was in stark contrast to the high-powered studio system that existed at the time.  So if Bogdanovich wanted to make his own film, he’d have to meet several seemingly odd Corman requirements, incorporating twenty minutes of footage from Corman’s Gothic horror snooze THE TERROR (1963) starring Boris Karloff (and a young Jack Nicholson), shooting an additional two days (twenty minutes of new footage) with Karloff (time still owed on his contract), while he was free to invent the rest.  Surprisingly, Bogdanovich jumped at the offer, shot by László Kovács, receiving uncredited (free) advice from none other than Sam Fuller behind the scenes, releasing the film between Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969).  Working with his wife at the time, Polly Platt, they constructed a modern day horror film, one that marked the passing of the torch from one generation to the next while accentuating the calamitous horrors leaping out of modern era newspaper headlines, in this case, the story of ex-Marine Charles Whitman, who became known as the Texas Tower Sniper, climbing to the top of the observation deck from the Main Building tower at the University of Texas at Austin carrying a bag filled with weapons, where for the next 90-minutes he proceeded to take sniper pot shots at anyone wandering by, slaughtering 16 people, wounding 32 others, and traumatizing many more in what at the time was considered the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history, now surpassed by the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, almost all using semi-automatic weapons, with the U.S. having the highest per-capita gun ownership in the world with 120.5 firearms per 100 people, the only nation in the world with more guns than people. 

Made for $130,000, shot in 23 days, the film is an orgy of gunfire, critically praised at the time of its release for its social commentary on the prevalence of guns (though hardly the masterpiece claimed by some), but the public had little appetite for it.  Although completed in late 1967, it was released the following year after the assassinations of Civil Rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. in April and aspiring Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in June, not to mention an endless war raging in Viet Nam, coming on the heels of earlier assassinations of President Kennedy’s in 1963 and Muslim activist Malcolm X in 1965, creating a political vacuum and a void in the heart of a surging 60’s leftist cultural ideology, leading to a right-wing law and order purge afterwards with the election of Richard Nixon as President in the fall of 1968.  Opening with a movie-within-a-movie, playing the finale of THE TERROR, the dual storyline has aging 80-year old actor Boris Karloff as horror legend Byron Orlok disgusted with the irrelevance of the film, viewing himself as an extinct dinosaur (appearing in 140 films, including 40 silents, starting as an extra in 1916), with horror films not scaring anyone anymore, retiring right there on the spot after viewing a preview with the studio heads, walking out as a supposedly free man, cancelling all his scheduled appearances, no longer beholden to the studios.  A secondary story follows Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Keefe, bearing a surprising resemblance to Matt Damon), viewed as your typical All-American boy next door, clean cut, polite, and unassuming, still addressing his father as “sir,” yet both have an obsessional devotion to guns, seen practicing together at the firing range, while Bobby has a trunkful of guns in his car.  With such a stockpile, it seems strange that he revisits gun stores regularly for still more rifles and ammunition.  Viewers learn he served in Viet Nam, and despite his passive nature around the house, he seems disturbed about something (“Sometimes I get funny ideas”) and tries unsuccessfully to talk to his wife before she’s off to work on the night shift, spending the rest of the night brooding alone.  By morning, he’s flipped out, losing his grip, crossing over to the dark side.  Bogdanovich plays a scriptwriter, Sammy Michaels (using Sam Fuller’s middle name) who offers a script to Karloff, disappointed that he decides to retire just at the moment he’s written something promising for him, which turns out to be the film we’re watching.  He’s got a fling going on with Karloff’s attractive young personal assistant Jenny (Nancy Hsueh, excellent, very surprising she didn’t have a more prominent career), who may be following Karloff back to England, though Orlok graciously releases her, not wanting to interfere with their budding romance.  Orlok changes his mind, however, and agrees to make one final scheduled appearance at the Reseda Drive-In Theater screening of his film, offering fans one final chance to see him.  Meanwhile, Bobby goes on a shooting rampage, shooting his wife and parents at home in the morning before heading out to a nearby oil refinery and climbing to the top of the tanks, in something of an homage to James Cagney in White Heat (1949), shooting randomly at passing cars on the freeway, with viewers seeing through the high-powered scope of the rifle, intentionally resembling the Zapruder tape of President Kennedy's assassination.  Never receiving permits to make a film along a busy LA freeway, this example of guerilla filmmaking best reflects Roger Corman’s economical style of filmmaking, getting in and out before drawing attention of the police.

Instead of a musical score, scattered throughout the film are lengthy stretches of loud radio noise playing during Bobby’s many car rides and banal, mind-bogglingly dull family conversations at home, drowned out by an always turned on television, adding a mindless tone to each sequence, lending an air of shallow superficiality to his psychological mindset, as endless layers of brainless mush are drummed into his head, suggesting the dumbing down of America.  While this doesn’t play a part for his gun obsession, it does weigh into his thoughtlessness and lack of remorse, as he simply doesn’t question what he’s doing, as if led by voices in his head, unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality.  With endless violence capturing the television replays and newspaper headlines, author Tom Wolfe coined the phrase “porno-violence,” suggesting viewers were becoming addicted to even more violence, adopting the point of view of the shooters instead of the victims, dulling one’s senses for empathy.  This film exploits that mentality, allowing the shooter to dominate the film, all done so casually, as if he’s at a sporting event picking off targets, overshadowing any link to an otherwise genuinely affecting performance by Karloff.  After evading police during his first shooting rampage, Bobby plans yet another, this time arriving early at the Reseda Drive-In Theater, eventually wandering to a sniper’s position behind the screen and shooting indiscriminately at cars, apparently attracted to lights, offering him an easy target, turning the evening’s events into utter chaos and bloody mayhem, with Karloff’s film playing on the screen, a symbol of Victorian horror that has been outdated by a prevalence of graphic war and violence imagery, becoming a link to our historical fascination with violence.  Even after the first few shots, the drive-in continues uninterrupted, with business as usual (there is a lovely tribute to another dying breed, the projectionist), as viewers have no idea what’s happening unless a body happens to fall nearby.  Downplaying the victims, always viewed in a detached manner, never accentuating the graphic horror, instead viewers see a collecting body count laying on the ground.  The focus, however, remains the shooter, which is a disturbing aspect of the film, as he’s a blank slate, learning next to nothing about him, seemingly without any real motive, where he could be anybody.  Even 50 years later, this is a difficult film to endure, watching him repeatedly load and reload, accompanied by an incessant sound of gunfire, a reminder of all the senseless shootings, over one-and-a-half million American gun related deaths since the release of the film, more than all those lost in wars since the Revolutionary War, with our nation failing to learn how to prevent these devastatingly traumatic events from happening, where there were more mass shootings than days in 2019, rarely even mentioned on news reports anymore unless they reach epic death count proportions.  What this suggests is that as a nation, we have built up a tolerance for these heinous sorts of activities, where the regular loss of lives is deemed acceptable, not out of the ordinary, requiring no lawful cure or remedy.  This era of filmmaking in the late 60’s and early 70’s opened the floodgates not just to excessive violence permitted onscreen, but an overtly stylized realism, exacerbated by these young American directors who were equally enthralled and fascinated by what they could get away with, which is starkly different than the previous generation.  Later surpassed by Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) and a host of other films, this film was largely forgotten, drowned out by the mainstream commercial success of The Last Picture Show (1971), placing the director among the Hollywood elite.