"The Harder They Come"
Directed by Perry Henzell
Starring Jimmy Cliff
Criterion Collection; widescreen (1.66:1)
Extras: Commentary by Henzell and Cliff; interview with record producer Chris Blackwell

When it exploded in U.S. theaters in the early '70s, campus hipsters everywhere adopted "The Harder They Come" as a fable of political and musical rebellion. They transformed this feral Jamaican film into a mainstream American phenomenon: one of the great college-town hits of its era.

On the audio commentary track to this Criterion DVD, producer, director and co-writer Perry Henzell says that he thought the movie played like two different films to international and homegrown audiences. While American students escaped into its thrilling otherness, black Jamaicans, recognizing themselves on the big screen for the first time, reacted with unselfconscious, squalling cheers.

A well-bred white Jamaican with a countercultural bent, Henzell geared the entire film for explosiveness, starting with his choice of subject. The hero of this gleeful rabble-rouser is a sexy, innocent country boy who hopes to score big in Kingston singing sizzling, street-inspired reggae music. He gets his chance to record, but balks when the local mogul offers him a mere $20 per song. So he enters the island's marijuana trade -- and there, too, he's a rebel. He refuses to kowtow to the trade's regulators (who include the police), and becomes a legendary outlaw and cop killer, a symbol of underclass revolt. He turns into a pop star when the one track he records -- the catchy title number -- inflames the countryside.

In the early '70s, the most seductive image offered to young black males in American movies was Superfly: a hustler preying on sybaritic white people. In "The Harder They Come," reggae star Jimmy Cliff gets to embody a black folk hero with the stature of a Jamaican Jesse James. As Henzell and Cliff clarify on this DVD (which intercuts interviews conducted separately with each of them), the movie's enduring, primal strength rests on the quasi-documentary foundation they laid for it. Cliff says that Henzell would often ask the singer how he would react to the circumstances of a scene. Henzell stresses his reliance on nonprofessional actors and actual locations to provide the movie with an electric ambience. It's not surprising that he acknowledges the influence of Gillo Pontecorvo, the director of "Burn!" and "The Battle of Algiers."

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