THE HARDER THEY COME by Perry Henzell, directed by Kerry Michael and Dawn Reid, with Rolan Bell. Presented by Mirvish Productions at the Canon Theatre (244 Victoria). Opens tonight (Thursday, July 23) and runs to August 23, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinees Wednesday, Saturday-Sunday 2 pm. $25-$95. mirvish.com, 416-872-1212.
The red fluid on the victim’s face is too bright and thick to be blood. It’s clearly that old B horror movie standby, corn syrup.
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But when a young Jimmy Cliff attacks the dude who tried to steal his bike, bad special effects take nothing away from the visceral power of the scene in 1972’s The Harder They Come.
The compelling story, incredible soundtrack (see sidebar), raw performances and vivid imagery in Jamaica’s most iconic film make things like fake blood and shaky camera work mere petty distractions.
Now the movie that made Cliff a star and introduced the world to reggae has become a musical, just in time for Caribana.
On the phone from his home in Paris, Cliff says he had no idea while filming The Harder They Come that it would ever achieve cult status.
“Sometimes when you’re making a record in the studio, you get that special feeling and go, ‘Yeah, this one I got,'” he says. “But you could never really tell that about a film.”
Still, his instincts were on point when commercial and documentary director Perry Henzell first approached him about playing the main role.
“My first love was always acting, even before singing,” he says. “I used to go see four or five movies a day, and always envisioned myself playing at Piccadilly, Broadway, all those places.
“So when the movie came, it seemed like the right vehicle for me.”
Uh, understatement of the year.
Thirty-seven years later, it’s hard to picture anyone else who could have played the role of Ivan, a country boy who turns outlaw after failing to make it as a reggae star in Kingston.
His were hard shoes to fill when the time came to cast the musical.
“We were looking everywhere – let me tell you, everywhere – for a young guy to play Ivan,” co-director Dawn Reid says from her Toronto hotel room.
Open auditions had yielded no one. Then along came Rolan Bell, 22 and fresh out of drama school. Reid calls him “perfect.”
“The part was just in me,” says Bell over the phone from his hometown of London, England, during production. Come audition time, he “felt at one with what they asked me to do and read.”
Producer Jan Ryan says there’s a real sweetness about the actor.
“But,” she adds from her London office, “there’s also something tough. And those were the two sides of Ivan that needed to come through.
“He’s the hero, but at the same time he’s a murderer. He’s a drug trafficker. So you have to have this ambivalence about Ivan. At the audition, Rolan personified that for us.”
Henzell saw the same duality in Cliff, though not at an audition. It was the sleeve of Cliff’s self-titled 1969 album that inspired him to cast the singer. On one side, Cliff looked like a winner, and on the other, a loser. Those two aspects of Ivan’s character are at diametric odds in the movie.
Bell, who appears in the long-running BBC soap opera EastEnders, remembers seeing The Harder They Come as a young’un.
“It was a film that my mom really wanted me to watch. I was 13 or 14,” he says.
I was around that age, too, when I first saw the movie, but the soundtrack was in heavy rotation on my parents’ turntable well before that. The title track alone has all sorts of nostalgic associations for me, from the layout of the house where I grew up to the aroma of West Indian cooking.
Tracey Nolan
Many have some form of sentimental connection to the film, but probably none more than Justine Henzell, the writer-director’s daughter. Perry Henzell died in 2006 as script editor, Justine has carried out his role for the stage production.
“I was very young at the time – so young that I wasn’t supposed to be on the set,” she says from her home in Jamaica. “But as my father’s office and studio were actually where we lived, of course I would go on set all the time.
“There was one scene that I was definitely not supposed to be there for, and that was the beating scene. It’s still very clear in my mind.”
Cliff remembers a different sequence particularly well – when his character had to swim out to a boat headed for Cuba.
“There were sharks circling that boat!” he exclaims. “And I wasn’t fully aware at first. I could have been eaten by a shark out there, so at the time I really felt the terror of what I was doing.”
Cliff understands people’s deep-seated emotional connection to the film.
“The movie was right in the spirit of what was happening internationally at the time. There was new, fresh music that hadn’t been heard. The whole culture, Rastafarian culture, coming out of the island, also resonated with people.”
“It was so authentic,” says Henzell. “My father was very clear in making the film that he was making it for a Jamaican audience. If it crossed over, great, but that was not his focus.
“And I think because he was so clear about that, it was completely authentic, and that’s what people still relate to over 30 years later.”
Cliff also cites the film’s documentary style and the fact that the cast was made up of amateur actors.
“We were actually coming across very real,” he says.
The film’s grainy, saturated aesthetic and dark, urgent energy must have been difficult to replicate in play form.
“They were,” says director Reid. “But I think with theatre you can take it somewhere else. The challenge was really grabbing that story and finding a way to make sense of it onstage.”
The way they found was through restructuring the narrative, which now starts at the end Ivan’s story is retold through a series of flashbacks.
Reid and company also directed the focus to the songs that are so essential to The Harder The Come.
Cliff says he enjoyed the stage production’s musical emphasis. However, in terms of how it translated to the theatre, “the rough edge of the movie, I thought, wasn’t there.”
Still, the musical couldn’t have found a stronger endorsement from the film’s star on opening night, when Cliff jumped onstage at the end of the show and performed a few songs with the cast.
While it didn’t compare to swimming with sharks, Cliff’s presence at the debut four years ago was terrifying for Bell.
“It was nerve-racking simply because I didn’t know what Jimmy Cliff would be expecting of it, what his expectations were of me as a performer.
“He’s a legend, and I’d been performing a lot of material that he himself wrote and performed,” he continues.
“I wanted to do the show as much justice as I possibly could.”
Interview Clips
Justine Henzell (daughter of the The Harder They Come’s writer/director Perry Henzell) reminisces about the film being made in her backyard while she was a child
The musical’s co-director Dawn Reid, on the story’s cultural and personal significance, and why she wanted to be involved with the project
Jimmy Cliff on what he brought to the role of Ivan as a reggae artist
Cliff on why he maintains an innovative spirit while working on new music
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