The Harder They Come

Most movies about people who dream of artistic accomplishment end with the hero achieving their dream. In Flashdance they make it plenty clear that this chick is insane by having scenes where she whips a brick through a guy’s window, or when she shows up at a five star restaurant wearing only a tuxedo’s collar and cuffs and offers to “fuck his brains out” really loudly. The effort she expends on choreographing concept dance pieces to amuse a bunch of drunken blue collar reprobates who probably don’t even appreciate her dance satire on media manipulation is a clear indication that if big things didn’t happen for this chick she was going to go postal. But everything works out and so that menace was never let totally off the chain. We knew she was violent, we knew she knew how to use a blowtorch, and once that old vaguely European lady who was her only conscience dies you know nothing is holding her back from tearing this world a new one. But the only thing she tears up is the dance floor. And it’s murder on the dancefloor in the Sophie Ellis-Bextor sense of the term.

The Harder They Come explores that potential of dreams going sour by taking a bad motherfucka with undeniable talent and showing the wrath of his frustration when his dreams don’t come true. I’ll bet when you saw Get Rich or Die Tryin’ you kinda knew that Fiddy was going to get rich when you walked in. The Harder They Come is the other half of that movie: dyin’ tryin’.

The film focuses on the character of Ivan, an aspiring singer with a smooth voice and great songwriting ability who has left rural Jamaica to come to the bustling metropolis of Kingston to pursue his dreams. But nobody ever gives him a break. He tries to survive by taking jobs that are beneath him, but finds he can’t take getting abused by bosses who are no better than he and he’s making a slave’s wage. Ivan quickly comes into a confrontation with his manager at a scrap yard and teaches his boss a lesson by playing tick tack toe on his face with a blade. Fuckin’ Aye! Who needs unions? Ivan’s a union of one! You don’t get more united or badassed than Ivan. Most dreamer movies have the dreamer blow up at their day job because inside they know that it doesn’t matter and that they’re destined for better things. Like in Blue Crush when Anne-Marie rants at the messy guests at her hotel and loses her job for rudeness. Only Anne-Marie didn’t turn around a chop up her boss’s face.

Ivan knows he can’t hold back his passionate nature; he can’t serve the man. So he heads down to the recording studio to press a record. He sings the film’s title song ‘The Harder They Come’. The record mogul is a big guy named Hilton. Hilton is a walking example of the classic rap saying “real gangsta-assed niggas don’t flex nuts, cuz real gangsta-assed niggas know they got ‘em”. Hilton doesn’t get very emotional and doesn’t repeat himself. He has a natural authority and doesn’t waste the sweat proving it. He offers Ivan twenty bucks for all the rights to his song. Ivan realizes this is a bad deal and tries to go independent but finds DJs in club and at radio stations are all controlled by Hilton and won’t play anything that doesn’t come from Hilton. As far as I know nothing has changed in the twenty plus years since this film was made. Most radio stations play the same five songs song by the winner of a karaoke show produced by the same corporation that owns them. Not songs by a legitimate badass like Ivan.

So Ivan sells his song to Hilton for twenty bucks and even though it’s a big hit Hilton keeps the stations and DJs from playing it too much because he knows Ivan’s got scrap in him and doesn’t want him to get too popular. Gladiator hadn’t even come out yet, but this Hilton guy knew how letting an entertainer get too popular always represents a potential defiance. Ivan is pushed into working in the drug trade, selling weed and helping load up airplanes and taking all the risks for no money. Ivan quickly begins to realize that the drug business is full of middle-management types who are taking all the profits from the real workers and starts to defy them. Ivan doesn’t waste time with unions and protests. If Ivan wants to file a job classification grievance the lead he’ll be using won’t be in a pencil.

Hilton is also connected to the drug trade and when he realizes that Ivan is stirring up trouble he gets some corrupt cops to arrest him. But Ivan goes berserk! He knows it’s a set-up and kills the cops and goes on the run! This where the film really starts to distinguish itself from Flashdance. Ivan starts murdering all the drug business middle management, corrupt cops and everybody else who’s ever fucked with him! The Jamaican people love that he’s killing everybody and start requesting his song with more fervour than ever. With every step Ivan defies Hilton more and more. It’s not enough that Ivan kills all the people in Hilton’s empire; he’s got to beat Hilton in terms of media control.

Ivan enlists a pro photographer to take some publicity shots of himself posing with pistols and looking pissed off. He strikes some powerful poses and the photos are iconic. They say on the DVD interviews that Jimmy Cliff, the actor who played Ivan, frequently shows up at reprise screenings of this film throughout the USA and when the scene of him posing with the pistols comes on he jumps up on the seats in the front row and starts posing along with himself on screen and crowds go wild for it. I wouldn’t advise anybody to run around in public posing with pistols, but I’m totally impressed that Jimmy Cliff takes the risk. If I saw that I’d go nuts! I wish more actors would do this. I’m sure it would boost the box office slump that all these execs keep complaining about. I could see Christian Bale jumping up with a chainsaw during screenings of American Psycho and the kids just loving it.

It makes me wonder if Ivan is based on Jimmy Cliff’s real life persona, though they don’t mention any real history of violence. The director says he cast him in this film based on an album cover that has two different shots of Jimmy Cliff: one friendly the other pissed-off on the back of the album. This guy can change his energy so fast, he’s the type of chap who could stop laughing at a hilarious joke on a dime, switch to scowl, and the whole room would go quiet with fear.

So Ivan uses his publicity stills and stats spraypainting his slogan: “I (for Ivan) WAS HERE” all over Jamaica. He becomes the most popular killer I’ve ever seen in a film. You know Hilton’s feeling the hurt. If this Ivan guy can promote himself to such popularity through murder, Hilton can just imagine how successful he would’ve been in the music career that he denied Ivan. It’s easier to promote music than killing. People like music more, it’s easier to dance to. But this Ivan guy gets people rooting more for him to rack up more deaths than to record another hit song.

Ultimately Ivan dies in a Scarface-style showdown with the entire Jamaican army and all that’s left is his song. And when you listen to the lyrics you realize it was his warning to Hilton and the world: DON’T FUCK WITH ME! It sounded all nice because it was reggae, but there’s a tough edge under there in the words.

This is a really fantastic film and they get plenty of people on the DVD telling you that. I’m always amazed at the people they choose to interview for these DVDs. For The Harder They Come they get the drummer from The Doors and a bunch of rock journalists, even though this movie is all about reggae. Maybe one of these guys has experience killing dozens of cops and that’s their relevance to this film. But if so, they should mention such credentials. On the Scarface DVD they got a bunch of young actors and some radio DJ to talk about how much they loved Scarface. The DVDs of Star Wars also have John Singelton, the guy who directed Boyz ‘n tha Hood, Higher Learning, and Poetic Justice talking about how much Star Wars inspired him, but unfortunately he doesn’t get specific nor does he explain why Tupac wasn’t added in to the Special Edition cuts of Star Wars.

I’m not surprised that all these people would want to share their enthusiasm for these films, but who is it that thinks to call them? Which DVD producer realizes that they’re putting out a new DVD edition of The Harder They Come and figures that the drummer from The Doors would be somebody to call and ask to talk about this? I just find that odd. But the next time they re-release The Harder They Come on DVD I hope they call me.