THE HARDER THEY COME (1973)
“With a piece in his hand he takes on The Man.”
— Advertising tagline for The Harder They Come
If not for The Harder They Come, you might not have that copy of Bob Marley's Legend CD on your shelf wedged between Marilyn Manson and Martha and the Vandellas. In 1973 reggae music was virtually unknown outside of Jamaica, but when the low-budget, rags-to-riches gangster flick became a hit on the midnight movie circuit, it helped to introduce a whole new audience to the music's lilting island rhythms.
Shot on a shoestring budget of $400,000, The Harder They Come tells the story of Ivan Martin (Jimmy Cliff), a young man from rural Jamaica who comes to Kingston to seek his fortune. Hoping to find fame as a musician, he tries to peddle a handful of original reggae songs. Naive to the ways of the record business, he is conned by music industry sharpies and winds up penniless and disillusioned. With his dreams of stardom shattered, he takes a job working for a local minister, but trouble in the form of a relationship with a ward of the preacher, Elsa (Janet Barkley), forces him to flee. While on the run Martin auditions for a producer (Bobby Charlton) by singing the movie's title tune. Impressed, the producer offers $25 for the rights. He refuses the paltry offer, and soon finds work as a ganja dealer.
In the mean streets of Kingston, the marijuana traffic is under the dominion of the police. Martin double-crosses the local drug lord (Carl Bradshaw), and is attacked by several police officers. Then an interesting thing happens: while on the run he becomes a folk hero when a record company cashes in on his notoriety by releasing his old audition tapes. His records top the charts as he has one final showdown with the corrupt cops.
The first thing that stands out about The Harder They Come is the music, which accentuates and propels the film's action. Three decades since its release the soundtrack still stands as the perfect introduction to Jamaican pop music. With the notable exception of Bob Marley, most of Trenchtown's biggest stars are represented here — Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, the Melodians, the Slickers, Scotty, and Desmond Dekker. Culled from a selection of Jamaican singles from the late '60s and early '70s, these songs represent the birth of reggae, a point at which the music was finding its feet, adding a slower, more complex rhythm to the traditional sounds of ska and blue-beat.
There is a wide berth of reggae represented here. Toots and the Maytals' “Pressure Drop” provides the soul, while the socially conscious “Shanty Town” by Desmond Dekker is true to the origins of reggae. Cliff's four selections — including the title track and “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and the Melodians' “Rivers of Babylon” — add a dash of syncopated pop. The music's harder edge is present in the songs of the Slickers and Scotty. It's a superb compilation, a cornerstone of West Indian music that earned an international audience for reggae, paving the way for Bob Marley and others.
The film itself probably won't win any awards from Jamaica's tourist bureau. Grim and violent, it eschews any clichés of Kingston as a laid-back island paradise. This is a raw film that delves into the frenzied street world of Trenchtown. Director Perry Henzell places much of the action in the city's decaying black ghetto, an immense tableau of rusted corrugated tin roofs and filth where people pick through garbage for food. Corruption and ruthlessness are ubiquitous, with violence around every corner. It's a bleak vision of Jamaica's emerging identity, breaking ground in its honest portrayal of Kingston's urban existence. Life imitated art when two of the film's actors were violently killed in Kingston shortly after the movie's release.
Whatever Jimmy Cliff's deficiencies as an actor, he more than makes up for in charisma. His scenes crackle with energy and authenticity. It's hard to take your eyes off him, even when the going gets grim, as when he carves up a man's face while snarling the line, “Don't . . . fuck . . . wid . . . me.” It's a gory scene (too much fake blood seeped through the actor's fingers, but with no money in the budget for a second take, the grisly sequence was left in the completed film), but is made more gruesome by the intensity of Cliff's acting. He's a better singer than actor, to be sure, but as Ivan Martin he brings a spirited amateur screen performance to life.
After the film's completion director Perry Henzell found that his vision of life in urban Jamaica was a tough sell to theater owners. Popular in Jamaica, The Harder They Come took several years to catch on outside of the Caribbean. Henzell hawked his film around the world only to be told, “nobody here is interested in reggae.” It took six years for the film to be shown in Italy, but when it did, reggae took off immediately there. “Bob Marley came in a year later and played to 100,000 people,” he said. That same scenario happened many times before the film found its mainstream audience. Part of the sales problem may also have been cultural. Foreign buyers had a hard time understanding the dialogue. Although it is in English, the heavy Jamaican patois proved daunting for some audiences, so Henzell added English subtitles to certain parts of the film. It remains one of the very few English movies to have English subtitles.
To date The Harder They Come is the only film from Jamaica's burgeoning motion picture industry to find an international cult audience. “It's two different films really,” Henzell says, explaining its appeal. “In North America, Europe, and Japan, it's for college-educated people who want to glimpse the other side. In places like Brazil and South Africa, it plays like Kung Fu for illiterate audiences.”
HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)
“My sex change operation got botched
My guardian angel fell asleep on the watch
Now all I got is a Barbie doll crotch
I've got an angry inch!”
— Hedwig (John Cameron Mitchell)
A frumpy German woman divorced from her American GI husband was the inspiration for John Cameron Mitchell's best-known character. “She had a trailer we went to and she'd give us drinks,” he remembers. “She had a lot of dates and I couldn't figure out why she was so popular, because she was not overly attractive, although she did have a certain pose. In retrospect, I realized she was a prostitute.” Mitchell expanded on that woman's unhappy story when creating the “internationally ignored song stylist” title character for Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
Hedwig creators Mitchell and Stephen Trask met because of a bad movie. They were seated next to one another on a plane and both hated the inflight film. Instead of watching the movie or falling asleep the strangers began to talk, hitting it off immediately as they traded work stories from their respective fields, theater and music. Post-flight the duo kept in touch and were soon collaborating on a project, a rock-and-roll musical. “I had become bored with doing the usual guest-star sitcom work and was interested in doing a solo piece incorporating rock music,” says Mitchell. “And then I met Stephen, who is an amazing composer.”
With Mitchell writing the monologues and Trask and his band Cheater providing the music, they soon whipped together an early version of Hedwig that played on drag nights at Squeezebox, a Manhattan rock-and-roll bar. Over the next few months the show changed and grew, as did its fan base. Soon they had to move to larger quarters, an actual theater in the West Village, and Mitchell's rowdy off-Broadway performances as the “girly-boy” Hedwig were garnering rave reviews and attracting attention from film companies.
Mitchell leapt at the chance to present Hedwig on the silver screen. “When I started writing for stage, I actually saw it more cinematically,” he says. “There were jokes or visual cuts I had in mind. And I thought, ‘Oh it would be so much easier if we could just show an image.' You know a picture is worth a thousand words.”
Killer Films, the company behind Todd Solondz's Happiness and the Academy Award-winning Boys Don't Cry, was chosen to produce the film, which was shot in Toronto.
The search for stardom and love begins with a German boy named Hansel who undergoes a sex change operation and switches his name to Hedwig, in order to marry an American GI and escape to the freedom of the United States. “To walk away,” he says,
“you gotta leave something behind.” Unfortunately the operation is bungled, leaving only a small deformed lump between his legs, the “angry inch” of the movie's title. The marriage doesn't work out, and Hedwig finds herself divorced and living in a trailer in Kansas with dreams of rock and roll stardom. “I scraped by with babysitting gigs and odd jobs,” Hedwig explains in the movie, “mostly the jobs we call blow.” She forms a band, and begins a relationship with one of her fans, a young boy named Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt). Together they write songs and yearn for a better life, and Tommy becomes Hedwig's protégé.
Tommy begins to have doubt in the relationship and finally abandons her when he discovers that she was born a man. “What's that?” asks Tommy, feeling an ever so slight bulge in Hedwig's pants. “It's what I got to work with, honey,” she says. He forms his own band and becomes a big time rock star based on songs he has stolen from Hedwig. “From this milkless tit you have sucked the very business we call show,” she says.
We learn all this through flashbacks, animation, and songs. The film begins in the present with Hedwig performing behind the salad bar at a chain restaurant called Bilgewater's. She and her band, The Angry Inch, are shadowing Gnosis's tour; while he plays the stadium in town, Hedwig, bitter and a little worse for the wear and tear, can be found around the corner singing for dumbstruck restaurant patrons who don't know what to make of her. As she stumbles through her tour, trying to capitalize on the fame of her ex-lover, she discovers the true origins of love.
The whole film is about duality and healing. Hedwig is the product of a broken home in communist East Berlin, a divided city. He reluctantly agrees to a sex change operation that leaves him split once again — not fully male or female. Hedwig's search for love and acceptance is the result of feeling like a divided person her entire life, so she makes it her quest to heal herself and become whole. That philosophy — that everyone is looking for something — drives the movie but doesn't weigh it down.
“Everything Hedwig does is to gain some kind of wholeness,” says Mitchell. “Everyone is seeking something and trying to make him or herself whole, including Hedwig and Tommy Gnosis as well. In the end it is Tommy who gives Hedwig the knowledge she needs to move on, to realize that she is whole in a way she didn't expect.”
It's a strange and sometimes sordid story, but is brought to sparkling life by Mitchell in the lead role. His Hedwig is a tour de force performance that hits all the right notes — the style, the sound, the fury, and the pain. There isn't a hint of parody in Mitchell, even when he is wearing some of Hedwig's more outlandish costumes and wigs. He plays it straight (no pun intended), and that is the beauty of the performance: the audience must feel for Hedwig or the whole thing will fall apart. Mitchell makes her lovable and keeps her interesting. Hedwig is all heart, especially when she is being self-deprecating. “I had tried singing once and they threw tomatoes at me,” she says, “so after the show I had a nice salad.” She's part vaudeville, part heartbreak.
Overall, Hedwig and the Angry Inch works extremely well as a rock-and-roll musical. Mitchell, who doubled as director, injects a fast and furious energy to the musical numbers, particularly one glam rock tune performed in a trailer home that transforms into a stage. Rock-and-roll musicals are a bit of a minefield, and rarely ever work on the big screen, but Mitchell's in-your-face style of directing is the perfect complement to his “post-punk, neo-glam” material. Hedwig rocks out with a fierce power rarely found on the silver screen.
HERE COMES MR. JORDAN (1941)
“A picture different from anything ever screened before!”
— Advertising tagline for Here Comes Mr. Jordan
As a film critic who sees several hundred movies a year, there are a couple of words that strike fear into my heart. The word “sequel” usually means that I'm going to spend a couple hours of my day sitting in a theater watching a bunch of Hollywood types thrashing away at a warmed-over concept. Another word is “remake” — I dread the inevitable ache of witnessing Guy Ritchie bungle Swept Away or watching a dead-eyed Sly Stallone in Get Carter.
Of course, not all sequels and remakes are train wrecks. Godfather 2 is arguably a better film than the original, and Steve Martin's Dirty Rotten Scoundrels vastly improves on the 1964 version of the same tale, Bedtime Story. The 1941 romantic fantasy Here Comes Mr. Jordan has been remade several times, with varying degrees of success. Six years after the original was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar the story resurfaced as a flashy Technicolor musical titled Down to Earth and earned favorable reviews for its star Rita Hayworth. In 1978 Warren Beatty retooled and retitled the story, scoring his biggest hit to date with Heaven Can Wait. In 2001 comedian Chris Rock took another kick at the can, but with far less satisfying results. His Down to Earth took a critical drubbing, with one noted critic calling it an “astonishingly bad movie.” It's time then to go back and have a look at the first and best version of the story.
Based on a popular stage play, Here Comes Mr. Jordan starred Robert Montgomery (father to Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery) as saxophone-playing boxer Joe Pendleton, who perishes in a plane crash on the way to his next fight. In Heaven he is told that there has been a mistake — he had been taken by an overzealous Heavenly Messenger (Edward Everett Horton) 50 years before his time. Looking for a way to right this wrong, angelic pencil pusher Mr. Jordan (Claude Raines) sends Pendleton's soul back to Earth. Unfortunately they are too late, and his body has already been cremated. The solution? Give him a new body.
Eventually they settle on the form of Oliver Farnsworth, a millionaire who has just been murdered by his wife. A new love and the scheming of the murderous wife complicate his new life as he prepares to win the prize fight he missed in his old body.
There are plot holes, some feel-good dramatics, and the occasional overwrought performance — check out Horton's contrite blubbering — but the light tone and breezy comic dialogue rise above the movie's shortcomings. So what if Robert Montgomery looks more like a matinee idol than prizefighter? This is a Hollywood screwball comedy, not Raging Bull. Taken for what it is, a charming romantic comedy without an ounce of irony or cynicism, Here Comes Mr. Jordan is a classic of its genre, and bears up to repeated viewings.
HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL (1958)
“If you flake around with the weed, you'll end up using the harder stuff.”
— Russ Tamblyn in High School Confidential
The credit sequence of High School Confidential kicks off with wildcat rocker Jerry Lee Lewis pounding out the title song while being driven through town on the back of a flatbed truck. He plays as though he has a fire in his belly, setting an unrestrained tone for the rest of the movie. Fasten your seat belts, daddy-o, it's gonna be a wild ride.
Tony Baker (Russ Tamblyn), a hip-talking transfer student, wastes no time in stirring things up at his new school, Santo Bello High. “I'm looking to graze on grass,” he tells a fellow pupil on his first day, making it known that he wants to score some marijuana. Baker is the epitome of hipster cool, a fast-talking juvenile delinquent who lives on the edge. He proves his juvie street cred by pulling a switchblade on his classmates and inviting his teacher Jan Sterling (Arlene Williams) back to his place to “live it up.” But there is something amiss: he also drinks milk, and refuses a toke from a joint.
After declining Baker's offer, Sterling attends a staff meeting with a federal agent. “In the language the addicts use, marijuana is referred to as Mary Jane, pot, weed, or tea,” the agent deadpans, before warning that a plague of drug use has happened in other schools and “it can happen here.”
Baker, meanwhile, has discovered an off-campus junkies' paradise, the local coffeehouse. A beatnik “doll” recites ridiculous rhymes — “We cough blood on this earth / Now there's a race for space / We can cough blood on the moon, soon / Tomorrow is dragsville, cats / Tomorrow is a king-sized drag” — while he tries to buy “some H, some coke, and some goofballs.” He meets the local drug kingpin, Mr. A (Jackie Coogan), wh
o also runs a jukebox empire.
Okay, so far there are drugs and rock and roll, but where's the sex? That's where the randy Aunt Gwen (Mamie Van Doren) enters the picture. She's a torpedo-breasted sex kitten who tries to seduce her nephew Tony every chance she gets. Baker is too intent on buying drugs to have anything to do with his lascivious landlord, and her advances go unheeded.
Near the end of High School Confidential there is the inevitable showdown between good and evil, before a high-toned narrator tells us, “You have just seen an authentic disclosure of conditions which unfortunately exist in some of our high schools today. The job of policemen will not be finished until this insidious menace to the schools of our country is exposed and destroyed.”
High School Confidential was produced by Albert Zugsmith, a journeyman journalist, producer, and director. “I don't make movies without a moral,” he said, “but you can't make a point for good unless you expose the evil.” To this end he made films (and fistfuls of money) about male impotence, racial bigotry, juvenile delinquency, sexual promiscuity, alcoholism, and of course, drug addiction. It may be hard to justify the contradiction of exploiting the lurid details of the human condition while at the same preaching against them, but Zugsmith is unrepentant. He fills High School Confidential with more hot-rod races, busty blondes in tight clothes, hip jargon, and drugs than any drive-in crowd could hope for, while at the same time bashing them over the head with a moral. High School Confidential outdoes other “just say no” movies like Reefer Madness for the sheer hilarious bludgeoning force of its anti-drug message.
While most of the ideas seem hopelessly outdated — one toke can lead to harder drugs; heroin, when thrown in the eyes, can cause blindness — I think the film makes one point that was years ahead of its time: the idea that bad kids can come from good homes. Even today, the topic is still viewed with bewilderment when shown on tabloid talk shows. High School Confidential suggests that everyone is susceptible to temptation, even middle-class kids who should know better.
The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen Page 12
