A Jamaican crime story

The Harder They Come (1972)

The very first Jamaican produced feature film is not your usual story about a poor boy who gets rich and successfull. Not by a mile, it's a whole lot more. The movie starts with quite common routes with a story of a poor man coming from the countryside to the big city in the hopes of making it as a reggae singer. Life is hard and soon he's drawn to ganja trading with the easy money it offers. Sounds a bit familiar right? Well it's not all, this movie takes quite unconventional routes which I won't say anything about to avoid spoiling it. All I'm saying is that the story works great even today. The movie is done with a very low budget which shows in many places, but apart from a few unintentionally funny scenes it doesn't matter that much. The story gets through. The acting is quite poor most of the time but that's quite understandable this being the very first feature film from the country. Not like there's a long list of good actors waiting around so I really didn't mind, it was good enough to keep the story rolling. I have to say that the Jamaican accent is quite hard to understand and luckily the DVD I watched had Finnish subtitles, so better make sure if you plan on watching this that the version will have subtitles or you might get a bit lost. Fans of reggae music will surely love the soundtrack and the rest can get a quite good thought provoking story. My hat goes off to the Jamaicans, very nice start for the Jamaican movies. Too bad the following movies coming from the country haven't been that great, but this surely is somewhat of a bright gem in there.
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