In 1972, director Perry Henzell set a gritty crime thriller in Jamaica's exploding, politically charged music scene, and came up with THE HARDER THEY COME—the cult-movie spark that started reggae music's slow burn around the world.
Host Rico Gagliano tells the story of a film and a soundtrack that inspired rebels and rockers from the Clash to Willie Nelson. Guests include Henzell's daughter Justine, UK music writer Lloyd Bradley, and Paul Douglas—drummer and bandleader of reggae legends The Maytals.
The third season of the MUBI Podcast, titled “Needle on the Record,” dives into the unifying power of movie music and tells the stories behind some of cinema’s most renowned “needle drops”—moments where filmmakers deployed pre-existing music instead of an original score. Each episode explores an iconic marriage of song and image that’s become part of pop culture. It’s a six-part mixtape for film lovers.
Discover what's on at the Public Theater in New York: publictheater.org
To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.
MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.
And if you are a Spanish-speaker, we encourage you to follow our Latin American show MUBI Podcast: Encuentros on your favorite podcast app. The show is produced in partnership with La Corriente del Golfo. Listen here.
In 1972, director Perry Henzell set a gritty crime thriller in Jamaica's exploding, politically charged music scene, and came up with THE HARDER THEY COME—the cult-movie spark that started reggae music's slow burn around the world.
Host Rico Gagliano tells the story of a film and a soundtrack that inspired rebels and rockers from the Clash to Willie Nelson. Guests include Henzell's daughter Justine, UK music writer Lloyd Bradley, and Paul Douglas—drummer and bandleader of reggae legends The Maytals.
The third season of the MUBI Podcast, titled “Needle on the Record,” dives into the unifying power of movie music and tells the stories behind some of cinema’s most renowned “needle drops”—moments where filmmakers deployed pre-existing music instead of an original score. Each episode explores an iconic marriage of song and image that’s become part of pop culture. It’s a six-part mixtape for film lovers.
Discover what's on at the Public Theater in New York: publictheater.org
To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.
MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.
And if you are a Spanish-speaker, we encourage you to follow our Latin American show MUBI Podcast: Encuentros on your favorite podcast app. The show is produced in partnership with La Corriente del Golfo. Listen here.
Heads up, this episode includes adult language descriptions of gun violence, and yes, spoilers. Kingston, Jamaica, circa 1969. A typical morning in the offices at 10A King's House Road. Or just 10A, for short. It's a film production house. Long haired bohemian types hang out, shoot in the breeze. Then they part. There's a guy named Bobby Russell shoves through with a record album tucked under his arm. Yeah, 10A was like the headquarters for a lot of people in those days, including myself. And it was like Grand Central Station. I mean, people were coming and going all day long. That's Bobby. And he was weaving through the throng that day to get to the boss. Perry Henzell. Perry'd been looking for someone to play the lead role in his first feature film, the story of a poor kid from the sticks who becomes an outlaw folk hero. And Bobby was pretty sure he'd found just the guy for the part. He hustled into Perry's office and held out the record. I said, I have a singer who is really good. Young, full of energy. And I'd love for you to tell me what you think. So I had that Jimmy Cliff album, which I gave to Perry. It was singer Jimmy Cliff's self-titled fourth album. Full of tunes in Jamaican music style that was just a few years old called reggae. But it was the cover that grabbed Henzell's attention. So he looked on it, didn't say anything and turned around, looked at the back of it, looked on front of it again. Looked on the back of it again... The front cover was a shot of Cliff, relaxed and vulnerable. A charmer. But on the back, he wore a fringed leather jacket looking almost haunted. With one word graffitied on a wall behind him. Fight. I said, "Well, what do you think?" He said, "I like it."I like the guy."Yeah, he looks like a rebel."He looks like a revolutionary." I said, "I guess he could look like a rebel if you wanted him to be a rebel." And he said, "Well, I want to hear his music." I said, "Well, you have the album in your hand and you can play tonight"and tell me what you think tomorrow." Perry Henzell did play that album, all night long, and an idea started forming. Not just to cast Jimmy Cliff as the rebellious main character, but to make the character a reggae singer, too. And that one change led to a movie and a soundtrack as revolutionary as its hero. I am Rico Gagliano and welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the curated streaming service that champions great cinema. On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. This is season three, we're calling it Needle on the Record.'Cause we're diving into a few of movie history's most iconic needle drops. Those moments when filmmakers take preexisting tunes, drop them in their films and end up with something legendary. And Perry Henzell's <i>The Harder They Come</i> is definitely that. A shoot from the hip indie feature the first ever shot in Jamaica by Jamaicans. That took the deceptively chill sound of reggae and put it in a whole new light. Suddenly everybody could understand reggae. You could say, right, this is what it's about and it means something. It's not just there to make white people dance. That is reggae historian Lloyd Bradley, and he's one of many folks I talk to about the very specific place and time that gave birth to this film, and how the movie launched Jamaica's music and culture way beyond its borders. It was funny, when I read the citation for the induction into the Library of Congress. It says for cultural significance to the nation. And the nation that they're speaking about is America. There's a lot more to this story than tropical vibes and ganja. So turn up the bass as we drop the needle on <i>The Harder They Come</i>. UK music writer Lloyd Bradley isn't a guy who minces words. Like his book about reggae is titled Bass Culture. And he wasn't happy when his American editor changed the title to This is Reggae Music. She said "If you call the book Bass Culture in America, people think it means low culture. Really? Oh, base in like b-a-s-e? That's what they thought? Well, this is what the idiot was thinking. It's like the word is b-a-s-s. I nearly told her to fuck off. And he's just as candid about why he wrote the book in the first place. Because the editor that approached me from Penguin, said"There's not been a book about reggae written by a black man."They've all been written by white guys." So I thought, oh, well, I better do one then. There's so many white guys that have taken over reggae, if you like, and become guardians of it, you know, directing it in a way that makes sense to them. So it's pretty impressive to hear the respect Bradley accords to a certain white man of reggae, the guy who made <i>The Harder They Come</i>. The late Perry Henzell. This was the thing about Perry. He wasn't part of this,"I'm looking at reggae with a fairly patronizing way" you know, he was completely honest about it. He was in there and he understood every little facet. And I think the fact that he was that kind of clued in surprised people. I think people were quite surprised by who Perry Henzell was. My father, Perry, was a maverick. That's Perry's daughter, Justine. He saw himself as a rebel. And his favorite title would be a rebel or a revolutionary. But really, he referred to himself that way? He liked it when others referred to him that way. Perry didn't exactly come from rebellious stock. Raised on a Jamaican sugarcane estate. He spent his teens gritting his teeth through boarding school, then dropped out of McGill University and worked on developing a healthy distrust of authority. He did not bow to convention. He did not believe anything should be censored. He was an environmentalist before people were speaking about climate change and the environment. And eventually my grandfather, who was a very conservative gentleman, said, "Get out of here."Go to England."I'm giving you a one way ticket and enough money"to buy a pick and a shovel when you get there." But in London, with some help from fate, he just avoided needing those kind of tools. He lined up with everyone else to get a summer job at the BBC, and the man at the gate was saying "Yard, stage."Yard, stage." And what did that mean? What was yard? Yard was moving things and trucks. Whereas the stage meant you were inside where a live TV was being recorded. So he lucked out. This guy just like, took... sized him up and said, "Yeah, you look like you belong on the stage." Or was it just the luck of the draw? He probably thought he wasn't very good at lifting stuff! This guy's a little too scrawny. Let's send him inside with the TV people. Exactly. Exactly. So he went into the BBC sound stage, he started by shifting scenery and became the youngest live producer in the BBC history at that time. And that's where Perry Henzell stayed for years, learning the ropes. Until the world changed, and kicked off a chain of events for Perry and his home country, that would eventually lead to <i>The Harder They Come</i>. The Union Jack is lowered and the new flag of Jamaica raised. Jamaica was getting independence from England in 1962 and so Perry wanted to be back in Jamaica to share in that excitement. Henzell came home, helped set up the Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation, then set out his own shingle, Vista Productions, located at 10A King's House Road. And he starts to make commercials. Hundreds and hundreds of commercials. He makes commercials for Jamaica, and Jamaican products. He was the first person to put Jamaican English, otherwise known as patois, in a commercial. He developed a cool, gritty style, making ads that were like little 60 second documentaries or experimental films. Sometimes featuring non-actors plucked off the street. He also helped produce ads for UK directors who came to the former colony to shoot in sunshine in the middle of the English winter. So he ended up getting to know a lot of commercial directors that went on to do great things, one of them being Ridley Scott, for instance. They were all over the island doing all kinds of things. Ridley Scott says he almost drowned filming one commercial. I can't remember which one that was. Creatively and financially, things were going good for Perry Henzell. But after a while... It was hard to ignore the same wasn't true for a lot of his countrymen. Independence only happened because the British could not take anything more out of Jamaica. European beet sugar replaced cane sugar, so that lost its value. They sold as much of the north coast off as they could to American hotel chains. Then there was the bauxite. They'd thrown a load of farmers off their land in the interior for bauxite strip mining, and there was nothing left, so... All right, you want independence, you can have it. And it was ten years late. Poverty grew worse in Jamaica. Shantytowns sprung up in cities. And Bobby Russell remembers that by the late sixties, something else appeared. There had been an introduction of gun violence, which hadn't shown its ugly head before. He blames it on politicians who started arming locals to intimidate political opponents and keep voters away from the polls. And of course, there's always a willing, unemployed, uneducated youngster who, having received a gun in his hand, immediately assumed a level of power that he had never experienced before in his life. Poor young men looking for some power and dignity and using guns to get it. It was a story Perry Henzell started feeling compelled to tell, and it couldn't be squeezed into 60 seconds. So now he decides, okay, it's time for me to tell a story in 90 minutes. And he remembered a real life story about an outlaw called Rhyging. Rhyging was a folk anti-hero back in 1948, the Jamaican John Dillinger. A violent young criminal who busted out of jail and went on a six week crime spree across the island. His every move reported and probably exaggerated in breathless newspaper stories. I have a vague memory of him. Yes, I remember hearing about him and hearing his notorious stories and how he shot policemen and had shootouts and he was quite legendary. Yeah, to the establishment Rhyging was a nightmare incarnate. But to poor Jamaicans, he was kind of inspiring. He was like a movie star at the time. And it sort of excited Perry, I think. He saw Rhyging as an example of what can happen to a Jamaican young man if you're not given a chance to make a positive contribution to society. So, he latched on to that story and actually wrote a screenplay around Rhyging. He started off with this script, and then when he cast Jimmy Cliff who was already a well-established singer at the time, that is when the character became a musician and a singer. Which made perfect sense because right around that time, the Jamaican music Perry Henzell heard on Jimmy Cliff's album, and all around him, was tackling exactly the same subjects. This is <i>007 (Shanty Town)</i> by one of my favorite musicians ever, Desmond Dekker. He'd originally made a name for himself, singing wholesome songs about, like, respecting your parents. But by 1967, he was writing songs like this. A hard look at rude boys, cool cat criminals prowling the ghetto.<i>♪ Oh-woah-oh, dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail</i><i>♪ A shanty town</i><i>♪ Dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail</i><i>♪ A shanty town</i> They loot, they shoot, they wail, in shanty town.<i>♪ Give it to me one time!</i> A year later, Toots Hibbert, lead singer of the Maytals, wrote a hit song about the time he was thrown in jail for a crime he didn't commit. The title and chorus were a shout out to his own prison number.<i>♪ 54-46 was my number</i><i>♪ Right now, someone else has that number</i> Reggae acts started singing songs about political oppression, religious oppression of Jamaica's Rastafarian sect, The Melodians adapted biblical psalms into <i>Rivers of Babylon</i>, a tune about the wicked enslaving the meek.<i>♪ 'Cause the wicked carried us away captivity</i><i>♪ Require from us a song</i> More and more of this kind of stuff is getting played all over the island on sound systems, huge mobile DJ rigs that set up at street parties. People eventually called it roots reggae. It was reggae that had something to say. It was ten years after independence. It was, well, yeah, we're independent, but what have we got? And the sound systems were the way people kept up with stuff, people communicated through it. If you said stuff on the sound systems, it was a bit like you'd said it on the radio or something. And the idea was that young people were coming up who only knew independence and only knew shortages, only knew encroaching poverty, and just started talking about it and making music about it. Perry Henzell, along with his co-writer, the Jamaican playwright Trevor Rhone, took that music, and that music scene, grafted it onto the story of Rhyging and ended up with a movie about class and corruption and social injustice, that also totally grooved.<i>♪ You can get it if you really want</i><i>The Harder They Come</i> is the story of Ivan, a young man from the countryside in Jamaica who comes into the capital city of Kingston with a dream. And his dream is to become a singer. And when he comes in, he is confronted with numerous challenges. To say the least. Under the opening credits, Ivan arrives in Kingston by bus, accompanied by Jimmy Cliff's optimistic tune."You can get it if you really want."<i>♪ But you must try, try and try, try and try</i><i>♪ You succeed at last</i> But the first guy he meets sums up what he's actually in for.<i>You have money?</i><i>If you have money, go anywhere at all.</i><i>But if you don't have money, you're fucked.</i>"If you don't have money, you're fucked." And then the guy quickly cons Ivan out of everything he owns.<i>Hey, come back here, man! Give me my things, man!</i><i>Come back here, man!</i> But Ivan's a resourceful cat, and eventually talks a studio producer into recording one of his songs, which happens to be about grabbing opportunity by any means necessary.<i>♪ So as sure as the sun will shine</i><i>♪ I'm gonna get my share now, what's mine</i><i>♪ And then the harder they come</i><i>♪ The harder they fall, one and all</i> Everyone agrees it's a hit waiting to happen. But Ivan learns fast that the music world's just as corrupt as the streets. He's forced to sign away the rights to his song for 20 bucks. $20?<i>Twenty dollars, Sir? That don't sound right.</i><i>How much you think it's worth then?</i><i>I don't really know, you know, Sir.</i> So to get by, he starts selling illegal weed for a dealer he doesn't realize is in league with corrupt cops. When Ivan demands yet again to be paid better, everyone conspires to get him arrested. But he kills a cop and escapes. And now, with nothing left to lose, takes off on a Rhyging style crime spree. Stealing cool cars, getting in shootouts, sending glamour shots of himself to the papers. His song about grabbing opportunity is suddenly a hit.<i>Where are you going now?</i><i>Where are you going to hide?</i><i>Hide? I not hidin'.</i><i>But everybody will be looking for you.</i><i>You didn't believe me?</i><i>Didn't I tell you I was going to be famous one day?</i> For a minute he's living the dream. Until... On an ironically gorgeous stretch of island beach, the cops close in. We're going to do a frontal assault! And bring him back to reality. Fire! Roll credits. It's a simple story, really, that wasn't so simple to make. Shooting <i>The Harder They Come</i> took years. Not least of all because Perry had to keep scaring up money to finance it. This was incredibly experimental. This was a film being made in Jamaican English, which no one believed would be able to capture an audience outside of Jamaica. Very early in the process, he said he made a decision to make a movie for a Jamaican audience, and that was a very big decision to make at the time when people were not familiar with reggae. Were not familiar with Bob Marley, were not familiar with Jamaican dialect. They were, you know, they were not dropping Jamaican slang into their everyday language in England. They were not wearing Jamaica colors and red, green and gold everywhere in the world. But all that was about to change.<i>The Harder They Come</i> explodes in Jamaica and starts reggae's slow burn around the world. Coming up in just a minute, stay with us. MUBI is a curated streaming service showing exceptional films, all handpicked by real people who really know movies. So you can explore the best of cinema from around the globe, streaming anytime, anywhere. And hey, speaking of movies from around the globe. If you are a Spanish speaker and a fan of Latin American cinema, MUBI's Spanish language podcast. It's called MUBI Podcast Encuentros, produced in partnership with La Corriente del Golfo. On every episode, we invite two Latin American filmmakers or artists to sit down and have a conversation about their shared love of cinema. Digging into how they make movies and reflecting on the films that inspired them. Previous guests include Gael Garcia Bernal, Carla Simón Martin Rejtman, and many more. There's even a special episode in English featuring the director of <i>Memoria</i> Apichatpong Weerasethakul, talking it up with Tilda Swinton. Follow and listen to Encuentros wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, after you finish listening to me today, you can stream some of the films we have featured on this podcast. All you gotta do is head to MUBI.com and look for the collection called'Featured on the MUBI Podcast'. Go figure. That's on the Now Showing page. As always, you will find all the links you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. So it's early 1972. Perry Henzell's been shooting<i>The Harder They Come</i> for two long tough years. But the soundtrack for his movie is about to come together. Almost literally overnight. So he says that was the best weekend's work he ever did. He was in London, and the final mix, sound mix was due. And the person who had promised to put together the soundtrack had not. And he had run out of time. So he went to bed and ran the film over in his head, over and over again, and wrote down all the songs that he loved that he thought would fit. And he did that in his mind all weekend. And on Monday morning he went in to the editing room and he slotted in every single song and they worked almost perfectly. Just on the first try? On the first try, because he knew the film so intimately, he was able to do that and he knew the songs. He really did. And by way of example, I want to take a quick dive into my favorite marriage of music and image in this movie. It's a scene that features a 1969 track by an act we heard a few minutes ago, The Maytals, led by legendary front man Toots Hibbert. If you met him today for the first time, you would think you must have known this man for ages, ten, twenty years. Because he treats everybody the same way. And it's genuine. That's Paul Douglas. He started playing with the band in the late sixties, and ever since Toots died in 2020, he's been their band leader. Though he's first to admit the guy was irreplaceable. Toots, to me, was like Jackie Wilson, or James Brown. I think he's one of the greatest singers ever.<i>♪ It is you (oh, yeah)</i> In the early years when I, when the band started, I used to consistently wear dark glasses, because this guy would sing in a way that tears would come to my eyes, man.<i>♪ I say, a pressure drop, oh pressure</i><i>♪ Oh yeah, pressure gonna drop on you</i> Toots also wrote this tune, <i>Pressure Drop.</i> Inspired, Douglas says, by a business deal gone bad. This is what he told me, he said maybe some producers didn't live up to their promises or something of the sort. And he said, "The pressure's going to drop on you."I said, pressure, I said, pressure."Pressure is going to drop on you." So if I'm getting this right, he' saying to a producer who wronged him, you'll get yours, buddy. The pressure is going to drop on you eventually. Absolutely. So, fittingly, Henzell deployed <i>Pressure Drop</i> in a scene that's all about payback. When Ivan, gun in hand confronts a dude who ratted amount to the cops.<i>Jose, you lookin' for me?</i><i>I come to shoot you...</i> And then chases him through a shantytown, eventually joined by dozens of little kids who try to help out by gleefully winging tin cans at the fleeing snitch.<i>You run, but I'll find you.</i><i>I'll find you, you hear?</i> For me and Lloyd Bradley, it's a moment where great music, fictional storytelling and Henzell's documentary style beautifully blur. It was a really hilarious scene, actually. You know, really, I would have loved to have asked Perry if he actually set that up or did it happen naturally, you know, 'cause a lot of this stuff went on in the film did happen naturally. You're saying, like it's possible that they, you know, shot that scene on location and the kids just happened to be there and joined in. It is very possible. Kingston, and the Kingston shanties was as big a star as anybody else in that film. So when Perry Henzell finally completed <i>The Harder They Come</i> in the summer of 1972, here's what he had. The first movie made by, and starring Jamaicans, speaking like Jamaicans, shot in the streets of Jamaica and scored with the music of the country's biggest stars. Needless to say, the night it premiered in Kingston at the palatial Carib Theater in an area called The Crossroads, everyone expected there'd be excitement. Thanks to a guy named Don Topping, they got more than that. Oh, that was, that was unreal. You see, they advertise the movie on radio. Don Tapping was a radio announcer at the time, and he kept promoting the premiere of the movie, not telling people that this was just a special invited screening. He was saying, hey, there's a movie tonight, not telling people you have to be invited to see this thing. No, he was just talking about this great movie. That would be opening at the Carib, and the Crossroads, which is quite a big area, was packed with, I don't know, maybe 20-30,000 people. I was too young to attend the premiere. I remember watching my mother get dressed, and when she got to the movie theater, she couldn't get anywhere close because it was being mobbed and everybody told her it was too dangerous. She needed to go home. And she said, "No way." My father was already inside the cinema, and she said she tucked her coat over her arm and that people recognized her. And she was kind of pushed over the heads all the way to the cinema door. She crowd surfed to the theater? She absolutely crowd surf. And inside it wasn't much different. You know, people who actually were inside for the premiere said you couldn't hear a word. People were just laughing and speaking to the screen. And it was, it was epic. The lines to see the film stretched around the block outside the Carib for weeks. The movie broke domestic box office records. Now, the question was, would audiences anywhere else have any interest in it at all? They left Jamaica and their next stop was the Cork Film Festival in Ireland, and there was not a sound in the audience. And Perry was devastated. He thought, okay, they hate it, that's it. It's not going to translate. It's not going to travel. And the film ended up winning the Audience Award in Cork. It was just a different kind of audience. You know, they were being respectful. They were not making any noise. Emboldened, Denzel added English subtitles for Brits who might not understand patois and booked the film into a theater in one of the UK's biggest Jamaican enclaves, London's Brixton neighborhood. And nobody came to see it. And so he stood at the exit to the tube, and he handed out fliers of all the Jamaicans coming home from work. That is how he got his first audiences. And unbeknownst to him, one night, a very influential critic rode his bicycle down to Brixton and saw the film with a Jamaican audience and was blown away. And that started the critical acclaim. After that review and after making a splash at the Venice film festival, the film got a run at a theater in London's Notting Hill. In the audience, a young Lloyd Bradley. It was great. I mean, there was a just such a kind of buzz of anticipation'cause what it was right, there was no black dramas on television and there was very, very few black people on television. And when we got films like <i>Shaft</i> and <i>The Harder They Come</i>, you look at, you're seeing yourself on the screen, you're not seeing it otherwise, you know. So that was a real big deal. Plus, it was like a really kind of good thriller. I mean, it was a really, really enjoyable film. So enjoyable, it's notoriety eventually spread to the cooler edges of the white world in both the UK and across the Atlantic. I think we originally booked that just as a regular film. I think it was a Sunday and Monday, a two day booking. That's Chuck Zlatkin. You may remember him from the last season of this very podcast. He was one of the programmers of New York City's Elgin Theater, birthplace of the midnight movie phenomenon. And the place was packed. But it was not just that it drew, being in there and watching how the audience responded to Jimmy Cliff's music and the excitement of the film, whatever, we just said, wow, this really has what a midnight show needs. They were right. The Elgin played<i>The Harder They Come</i> to full houses every weekend evening at midnight for two years. In fact. The only thing that stopped the film from continuing playing at the Elgin was the theater went out of business. Now the rest of the story would be way easier to tell if I could say the movie's soundtrack rocketed up the charts and the world beyond Jamaica was suddenly exposed to reggae for the first time ever. But the truth is a little subtler. Like, for one thing, the U.K. underground had been grooving to the latest ska and reggae records for a decade. At first, thanks to ex-pat Jamaican DJs. You had someone, say, who was part of a sound system in Kingston, he'd come to London, get involved, or start his own sound system in London, and he'd be in touch with the old people in Kingston who would send him records. So it was parallel. I mean, what came out in Jamaica would be in London within a couple of weeks. UK labels like Trojan, and Island, sometimes even broke the music into the mainstream. Just one example, Jimmy Cliff, who was actually living in England when he was cast in the movie, had already scored two top ten hits there. Including a cover of Cat Steven's <i>Wild World</i>.<i>♪ Oh, baby, baby, it's a Wild World</i> I mean, there was a period it was probably from 69 to 70, 71 maybe where reggae became a hip. It was a kind of novelty, if you like, but it was also, it's a big hit in kind of discos and clubs and that. People, people liked it. It was upfull. It was easy to dance to, you know, even white people could dance to it. So, you know, it took on like that. People just loved it was this kind of sort of bouncy pop music. But Bradley says there's the rub. For the mainstream reggae was groovy for dancing, but it didn't seem like art. Remember at this time, rock and roll, it morphed into rock. It was all about albums, it was prog rock was starting. This was all very serious stuff. And reggae was just this kind of harmless sort of pop music. But what <i>The Harder They Come</i> said to the world in general, this is something you can take seriously. This, you can take this as seriously as you could any rock music. Right, there was some substance to it. Yes, that's it. Completely.'Cause it's never been there before, y'know. Everybody talks about the Bob Marley and the Wailers album,<i>Catch a Fire</i> as being the thing that took reggae international. It wasn't. It was <i>The Harder They Come</i> because suddenly everybody could understand reggae. You could say, right, this is what it's about. And it means something. It's not just there to make white people dance. Now, the movie was no instant moneymaker. Justine Henzell says it took at least half a decade for her dad to pay back investors. What it was was a cult hit, and the rebels and rockers who saw it over the years definitely started taking reggae seriously. Political punks The Clash went on to write <i>The Guns of Brixton</i>, a reggae jam about police brutality and a black man who, quote, "Feels like Ivan"Born under the Brixton sun."<i>♪ You see, he feels like Ivan Born under the Brixton sun</i><i>♪ His game is called survivin'</i><i>♪ At the end of the harder they come</i> His game is called survivin' at the end of the harder they come. In fact, later the Clash straight up covered one of the movie's familiar tunes.<i>♪ I say, a pressure drop, oh pressure</i><i>♪ Oh, pressure gonna drop on you</i> While stadium rock acts came to idolize Toots Hibbert the guy who wrote and sang the original tune. The Eagles wanted him to open for them. The Eagles, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt, followed by The Who. Yeah, in 1975 Toots and the Maytals opened 19 U.S. Stadium shows for The Who. The Rolling Stones became admirers and sometimes collaborators. After Toots died, Mick Jagger said, quote, "When I first"heard <i>Pressure Drop</i>, that was a big moment."<i>♪ I say, and when it drops, oh, you gonna feel it</i> And meanwhile, long after the movie left theaters, the soundtrack kept rolling along, getting discovered and rediscovered by musicians and college students and hip DJs, decade after decade. It was never like on any charts. It never charted or anything like that. But the soundtrack has just been one of those slow and steady forever sellers. It just keeps, it just keeps going. I checked the record collector website Discogs, they list 174 separate releases of <i>The Harder They Come</i>. 44 in the U.S. alone. And you'll probably find a copy of at least one of those in the record collections of U.S. musicians like bluesman Taj Mahal or punk rockers Rancid, or Cher, or Willie Nelson.<i>♪ So as sure as the sun will shine</i><i>♪ I'm gonna get my share now of what's mine</i> Because they've all covered songs off it.<i>♪ The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all</i> It was put into the Library of Congress last year. It's only the second reggae album to ever be inducted into the US Library of Congress. The other one being Bob Marley and the Wailers. It was funny when I when I read the citation. It says, "for cultural significance to the nation" and the nation that they're speaking about is America. And that really struck me. That's right. It's a Jamaican... It's an album that is born and recorded in Jamaica. And then it's inducted as having a cultural impact on America. Yeah, it's pretty significant.<i>♪ 'Cause as sure as the sun will shine</i><i>♪ I'm gonna get my share now</i> Let's do the kind of aftermath here. Your dad made only one, kind of, barely completed movie thereafter as far as I know. Why? Why? Oh, that's a really sad story, Rico. So he made <i>The Harder They Come</i>, which was not experimental enough for him. He wanted to go even more experimental with his second film, which was called <i>No Place Like Home</i>, that had no script at all. And he got some money together and he did an initial shoot. And again, he ran out of money and then he had to put the film in storage in New York because we had no facilities in Jamaica. And a couple years later, he had cobbled together some more money, so he went to go and retrieve the footage. And when he went to the storage facility, they said, "Here is your film" and it was actually a porn film. And he said, "That's not my footage." And they had lost it. And he gave up on film in that minute.- Really? Like, immediately?- Immediately. He was so heartbroken. Now, decades later, the footage was miraculously found. Henzell even screened<i>No Place Like Home</i> as a work in progress, at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. But he died two months later, aged 70. Justine and her team finished it posthumously in 2019. And if you think I'm ending the story there... Well, no.<i>♪ By the rivers of Babylon,</i><i>♪ Where we sat down</i> This is the sound of rehearsals for the latest incarnation of<i>The Harder They Come</i>, a stage musical. It just wrapped up its first run at the Public Theater in New York City.<i>♪ There the wicked Carried us away in captivity</i><i>♪ Required from us a song</i> It's written by Pulitzer winner Suzan-Lori Parks. And here's the guy entrusted with the music. My name is Kenny Seymour and I am the music supervisor, orchestrator and arranger for <i>The Harder They Come</i> here at the Public Theater.<i>Come on everybody, we've gotta stop the tape!</i> Seymour first saw the original movie as a teen in the eighties on VHS, and was surprised to find himself relating to Ivan not as a criminal, but as an artist. You know, I was a teenager and I was involved in music since I was seven. My parents were also involved in music. My father was in an oldies group called Little Anthony and the Imperials, and my mom was on Broadway in the original company of <i>Hair</i>. So it was just exploring another culture and seeing, you know, something familiar. I'm not from Jamaica, but just seeing similarities in music and a musician and a singer trying to make it. And the struggle, you know. All right, then I can probably guess. But what is your favorite song in the show? Oh, gosh. <i>You can get it if you really want</i>. Of course! I love the feel of<i>You Can Get It If You Really Want</i>. You know, you can get it if you really want. But you must try. Try and try. Try and try. You'll succeed at last. I mean, that's pretty self-explanatory. And it's true, although in the movie I don't know how it's used in the show yet because I haven't seen it. But in the movie, it ends up being like, kind of ironic.- Yeah!- Because he doesn't succeed at last.- He gets shot.- Exactly. You know, but in the end, the music lived on.- You know.- Oh, interesting. So it's like in the face of all this money and power, the song is its own triumph. Exactly. Perry Henzell only finished one film in his life. He had the one song. But on screens and on records and on stage, it's still alive. In this story, the rebel won. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us to make sure you get a front row seat for more deep dives into movies and music. Next week, though, we're taking a mid-season break to bring you a special episode. It's my conversation with a writer-director who uses everything in his movie vocabulary, except vocabulary. When I start writing, I really write choreographies. I write intentions of movement, music, sound, color. But I never write words. Lukas Dhont director of this year's gorgeous Oscar nominated movie <i>Close</i>. Follow us so you don't miss it. Meanwhile, this episode was hosted, written and edited by me, Rico Gagliano. Jackson Musker is our booking producer. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Stephen Colon mastered and engineered. Martin Austwick composed our original music. Additional music by the band People with Bodies. Thanks this week to Chas Pace and the Sound Company in London and everyone at the Public Theater in New York. Suzan-Lori Parks stage anthology <i>Plays for the Plague Year</i> open there on April 5th, 2023. Check the show notes for details. The series is executive produced by me, along with Jon Barrenechea Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. If you love the show, tell the world, won't you? By leaving a five star review, wherever you listen, let them know we're not your standard movie show. Also, if you've got questions, comments, or if you've got an original Desmond Dekker and the Ace's LP, you want to cut me a deal on please fire off an email to podcast@mubi.com And of course, to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast. Just head over to MUBI.com to start watching. Thanks for listening. Be safe. Now go watch some movies.