But if you remember The Harder They Come for its soundtrack rather than for the movie itself, you're in for a big surprise. This picturesque cult classic has aged remarkably well -- the politics are still vital, Perry Henzell's direction crisp and professional, and the story exciting and fresh.

Jimmy Cliff plays Ivan, a character loosely based upon Rhygin, a genuine Jamaican outlaw folk hero of the 1950s. Ivan is a renegade songwriter from the boondocks of Jamaica who comes to the big city looking for dreams and only finds reality. He's ripped off, beaten up, falls in love with a minister's ward who hates his guts, peddles ganja on the street, and finally sells a song to the only game in town for a measly $20. Within half an hour, he's doing battle against the music industry, old-time religion, corrupt police, more corrupt dope dealers, and life in the slums simultaneously making it to the Most Wanted lists and the pop charts. It's an anti-tourism film, violent and energetic, yet somehow managing to discretely combine political realism with show biz fantasy shoot-outs.

The Harder They Come came from left field as far as the film community was concerned. Everyone thought of foreign films as French, Italian, or Swedish, so an oddity labeled "Jamaica's very first feature-length film" caught everyone by surprise when it premiered in the United States at FILMEX -- The Los Angeles International Film Exposition in 1972. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times immediately picked it as one of the best of the festival, calling it "delightful, poignant . . . timeless and universal . . . nothing short of amazing." He virtually dared some American film distributor not to pick it up.

Luckily, New World did, and it became one of the hits of the year, making Jimmy Cliff an international star. Cliff, whose real name is James Chambers, was a ska recording artist from the early 1960s. He eventually won a Grammy for best Reggae Recording of 1986, but it's hard to beat what he wrote in 1972. The soundtrack to The Harder They Come is something like the Sgt. Pepper's of reggae -- one of the hippest and most memorable collections of Jamaican music ever recorded. (Of course nobody can possibly accuse the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of any form of hipness. They gave the Best Song award that year to "The Way We Were" rather than "Many Rivers to Cross" or "You Can Get It If You Really Want")

Reggae was more than a style of music, it was a political, social, and artistic movement throughout Jamaica. The police shut down production of The Harder They Comemany times due to the radical political content, and it turns out they were justified in doing so. When the film opened in Kingston, the islanders were overwhelmingly in favor of Ivan's wholesale slaughter of the local police department; not coincidentally, the reigning conservative Labour Party Government was voted out of office at the next election. According to Jimmy Cliff, The Harder They Come functioned as a persuasive piece of anti-government propaganda that actually prevented violence because "if the Jamaica Labour Party had been returned, there would have been a revolution."

How many films are there that you can tap your feet to and that helped topple a repressive government? Only one.
-- MICHAEL DARE

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