Co-writer, producer, and director Perry Henzell establishes Jamaican society as a place of crushing poverty ruled by corrupt authority. Desperate and broke, Ivan is given a place to stay and a meager job by the church, but he quickly finds existence under the Preacher (Basil Keane) oppressive and worthless. Promises of an eternal paradise after death are hollow to Ivan. What’s paradise worth if he’s too dead to enjoy it? He wants a little taste of it while he’s still alive.

Ivan’s salvation will come from music, not God. He sticks to his dream of recording a song and finally convinces music mogul Hilton (Bob Charlton) to give him a chance. His song, “The Harder They Come,” expresses his frustration with all aspects of the controlling Jamaican society. It’s a great song, but Hilton, who controls the entire music industry, will only give Ivan $20 for it. Unable to get the song any attention without Hilton’s backing, he gives in. “I make hits, not the public,” Hilton tells Ivan. “I tell the DJs what to play.” Evidentially Hilton went on to a very successful career at ClearChannel.

His music dreams fulfilled but not lucrative, Ivan turns to crime where he encounters more corruption: while he is forced to assume all the risks, Ivan has to kick back most of the money he earns to his superiors in the drug trade. And just as Hilton owned the DJs, the dealers own the Jamaican police, who allow the drug trade to continue as a way of controlling the underworld. Eternally unsatisfied by his lot in life, Ivan is marked for death by the bigger dealers but manages to kill the policemen who are sent after him. Almost immediately, Ivan becomes a full-fledged murderer/media sensation. And suddenly “The Harder They Come,” his little forgotten song, is an overnight smash hit.

Like Arthur Penn’s BONNIE AND CLYDE, made about five years earlier, THE HARDER THEY COME links youth revolution with the actions of desperate blue collar outlaws who turn to crime as a way of making their fortunes and sating their lust for fame and power. Both films also feature key scenes in which their heroes go to the movies. In BONNIE, the Barrow Gang watched GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933. In HARDER, Ivan and his pals chuckle their way through a formulaic Western. The suggestion - one that I’m sort of cribbing from J. Hoberman in his book The Dream Life- is that these losers desperately wanted to be up on the movie screen, and by becoming murderers and media sensations they essentially turned their lives into movies. HARDER’s brilliantly constructed final showdown even manages to return to this idea through some clever flashback crosscutting that reminds us that heroes in movies in the period were very prone to dying in the final reel.

Henzell had only a fraction of Penn’s budget and a far more difficult production (shut down frequently by the Jamaican police due to the film’s dangerous political material). Authority in all its forms is corrupt, unjust, and ultimately pretty square. They control Ivan and his peers through the suppression of their ideas and their culture. His murders put him beyond the reach of authority; even if they can attack him they can’t stop his music, which is now too popular to keep of the airwaves. Or his movie, which was a huge international hit in 1973, and is still brutally relevant and coolly entertaining.