The Harder They Come: Rougher Version

Michael Thewell, describing his process of composing the novelization of Perry Henzell and Trevor Rhone's 1972 classic Jamaican film The Harder They Come, has explained that he began by immersing himself in the film since no complete script existed. Given a print, Thewell projected it "over and over against the wall of [his] study as [he] scribbled down the dialogue." ¹ He attributed the nonexistence of a script to "the grim economic realities of the black world," which necessitated that the film be "shot piecemeal, in fits and starts, with months intervening between shoots as additional funds were scraped together." ² Lloyd Bradley's book Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King (2000), however, quotes singer and actor Jimmy Cliff's references to a screenplay: "Chris Blackwell gave me a script for the film and tell me that same guy [Perry Henzell] now want me to play the lead part." ³ Other recent studies of Jamaican dancehall culture and cinema have emphasized that the film was shot without a script. Norman C. Stolzoff's book Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (2000) claims that "the movie was shot without a screenplay." ⁴ Keith Q. Warner's book On Location: Cinema and Film in the Anglophone Caribbean (2000) presents convincing evidence of the improvisational nature of the filming process. In a 1998 interview with Warner, Franklyn St. Juste, the director of photography for The Harder They Come, explained that the film project did not originally follow the structure of the finished product: "They shot first, then they put it down, and they shot again, and then they put it together and found that it lacked definition. Characters had no motivation, situations were not resolved, and so on. So they shot again, and it was then that they started bringing in the atmosphere, all the colour, all the feeling, the ambience of the story came out then." ⁵ Of the script, St. Juste remarks, "I understand there was supposed to be a script by Trevor Rhone and Perry Henzell, but I never saw it," and more emphatically, "I never saw a script, not a sheet of paper." ⁶

When I interviewed Perry Henzell in 1997, he assured me that his original working script—the version drafted before Trevor Rhone assisted with revisions—contained dialogue in Jamaican patois and followed to a great extent the story line of the film. The only major change, according to Henzell, included the fortunate casting of Jimmy Cliff in the lead role as the gunslinger Rhygin' and the subsequent alteration of the legend to portray Rhygin' as a frustrated reggae singer. Additionally, actors improvised some of the dialogue in order to capture with authenticity Jamaican urban speech, rendering obsolete the original scripted dialogue. ⁷ Henzell has made known over the years his artistic commitment to bringing the camera close to "real people" and authentic locations. His sensibilities and achievements may be better appreciated now that the film has been re-released in an enhanced DVD format (2000), featuring extensive commentaries by Henzell, Chris Blackwell, and Jimmy Cliff. ⁸ All three refer to the piecemeal shooting process and the obstacles. As Cliff remembers: "I know the movie got shot down many times along the way for various reasons—for money reasons." ⁹ He also refers to politically inspired interference by the police, who disrupted the filming "many times." Cliff and Henzell do refer to scripts. Moreover, although Henzell states, "I wrote and produced and directed this movie," he also gives credit for the scripting of some scenes to his cowriter, explaining that the accomplished playwright Rhone "threw out the whole first part" of his script and came up with the idea of starting the story with country youth Ivan's arrival in Kingston by bus. ¹⁰ He describes the effort of revision, analyzing why a "big fight" ended the collaborative relationship between writers once the filming process began.

What is conspicuously missing from the stunning...