The Harder They Come

The Harder They Come, set in 1970’s Jamaica, is a story about Ivanhoe “Ivan” Martin (Jimmy Cliff), a poor country boy who moves to the city after his grandmother’s death to pursue a singing career. What he finds when he reaches Kingston city is more than he bargained for. Trouble finds Ivan immediately, as he is robbed for all of his possessions by a local vendor and is denied housing by his mother (Lucia White) in her tiny home. He spends his first nights sleeping on the street.

Ivan’s mother sends him to live and work with a local preacher (Basil Keane) but he soon finds Preacher too overbearing and strict and is forced again onto the streets when he begins a romance with a young lady (Janet Bartley) that Preacher has been courting since a young age.

With no money, nowhere to live, and in dire straights, Ivan enters into the ganja trade, hustling ganja for the local “Don”, Pedro (Ras Daniel Hartman). He soon feels taken advantage of, paying most of his earnings to police and Pedro, leaving him with barely enough to survive. When he questions the politics of the ganja trade and confronts the “Don”, his real trouble begins.

Ivan thinks his luck might be changing when a local record producer, Mr. Hilton (Bob Charlton), lets him record a song and he hears it played that night in the local dance hall. But he soon learns the politics of the music business and is once again taken advantage of. Forced to sign the rights of his song away for $25.00, Ivan is once again with his back against the wall, fighting to survive.

He decides to challenge Pedro for control of the ganja trade, but it only puts him in deeper trouble. When he refuses to pay Pedro his weekly protection fee, Pedro has the police stop Ivan on his way back from the country with a load of ganja. Now a wanted man, Ivan eludes Pedro and the police until he is cornered one night and is forced to kill a police officer. Wanted for the murder of a police officer, Ivan must now fight for his very existence. His legend is growing and he receives much help from the community and is able to elude capture for quite some time.

Finally, Ivan is cornered on a sandy beach, armed with two pistols, he takes his last stand, but is tragically overpowered and shot down on the beach.

Overall, everything technical in the film, lighting, film, and sound, would be considered poor, but this movie truly captures the climate of 1970’s Jamaica like no other has been able to do since then, giving the viewer a very intimate perspective of Jamaica in the seventies. This is one of my all time favorite movies and I would it give it an A+ gangster rating.