“The Harder They Come” Review!

“The Harder They Come” Review!

Director: Perry Henzell

Cast: Jimmy Cliff, Janet Bartley, Carl Bradshaw

Directed by Perry Hensel and starring Jimmy Cliff, Perry Hensel's "The Harder They Come" is a blaxploitation classic about a country boy who turns to crime in Kingston, Jamaica. The film presents it as a charming and gritty crime flick that helped bring Jamaican reggae to audiences around the world. Actor Jimmy Cliff takes center stage in the bounty of his booming period. None of this is untrue, but it damages the radical anti-capitalist, liberation message at the center of the film.

"The Harder We Come" tells the story of Ivanhoe (Cliff) who moves to the big city and eventually embarks on a notorious crime spree. We've seen a lot of basic structure: what really sets this film apart is director Perry Hensel's interest in the textures and sounds of Kingston, a hand-held shooting style combined with fragmented, elliptical editing. which more closely resembles the third film. The movement inspired Take No Prisoners at the same time throughout Latin America.

Ivanhoe's visit is surrounded by rampant corruption, rampant capitalism and colonial hangovers. The film's centerpiece is the title track - a call for struggle and self-determination at all costs. The producer recording the single, Hilton (Bob Charlton), offers Ivanhoe an exploitation contract and decides to press the track. His parasitic relationship with music effectively leads Ivanhoe to illegal status, and Hensel is taken aback by the hand-to-hand relationship between the company's owners, the security of the state, and profits from the drug trade. at the highest levels of Jamaican society. That fragmented edit comes to the fore again here. The film is rarely interested in the who-what-why plot, but in the visual interaction between all these forces, using the improvised, on-the-fly nature of the shooting to craft a work that is full of energy. burns.

On the first night, his first night in Kingston, a poor Ivanhoe goes to the movies and watches the spaghetti western classic Jango. Spaghetti is an Italian reinterpretation of the Western style invented by white Americans to convey the myth of extravagance and superiority. Hansel focuses on the audience, the predominantly black crowd cheering the film within the film. Later, as Ivanhoe makes his final stand as a local folk hero, the editing returns to audience enthusiasm, suggesting that the crime genre produced and exported by American culture is in the midst of a rapidly evolving and innovative revival. ripe for. The world is an extraordinary moment of self-reflection, the freedom to rethink cinema's past to respond to its future.