As Sure as the Sun Will Shine: Justine Henzell on The Harder They Come at Fifty

Released in 1972, Perry Henzell’s thrilling drama The Harder They Come, starring real-life reggae icon Jimmy Cliff as singer-turned-outlaw Ivanhoe Martin, was among the first films to prominently feature reggae music both as subject matter and on its soundtrack. The movie was a smash, while the album created an international sensation, highlighting recent hits from a genre that had only begun to emerge a few years before. A perfect storm of rhythm, bass, melody, and political, spiritual messaging, reggae was born in and exploded out of Jamaica in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and has since become one of the most influential and popular forms of music around the globe. In the 1977 documentary Roots Rock Reggae, Cliff describes it as “the cry of the people,” a pithy encapsulation of its direct, documentary-like lyrical content and empathetic appeal.

Fifty years have now passed since the premiere of The Harder They Come, and the film retains an iconic cultural presence, in large part thanks to its director’s daughter Justine, who is chiefly responsible for maintaining its legacy. (Justine is also a filmmaker in her own right and cofounded, in 2001, the biennial Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica’s Treasure Beach.) She is currently organizing a major anniversary celebration in Kingston this June. Set to take place at 10A West, King’s House Road—the location of Perry Henzell’s production company, and effectively the birthplace of the film—this celebration will feature over thirty Jamaican artists working on the island and overseas who have been inspired by the film.

I recently caught up with Justine Henzell to discuss the making of The Harder They Come, the continuing importance of the film and its soundtrack, and the story behind her father’s long-lost follow-up, No Place Like Home. Both films are part of the series Roots & Revolution: Reggae on Film, playing now on the Criterion Channel.

How do you feel about the legacy of the film? It’s still so culturally prominent.: It’s incredible. The good will that the film has, universally, is fantastic. I have bittersweet emotions about Jamaica’s film industry at this point because fifty years later we should have had many more The Harder They Comes, not in terms of style or genre but reach and success. We haven’t yet had that, and that is a little disappointing, but I feel that we are poised for an explosion of Jamaican film and TV content, which has been delayed two years by COVID. My hope is that the attention that the forthcoming fiftieth anniversary will receive will be useful for the young creatives, filmmakers, and poets who are working now—that the attention for The Harder They Come will actually spill over onto their work. There can never be another The Harder They Come, because the first is always the first, but it has informed and inspired new and different work.

How did the film come together?: The Harder They Come took years to make. Perry had worked at the BBC, got his training, and came home to Jamaica when we got independence in 1962, because he wanted to be a part of Jamaica coming into its own. He worked in advertising, and he did many, many commercials. He was the first person to put Jamaican English into commercials, which in those days were shown in the movie theaters. He then wanted, like many directors, to do his first feature, and he remembered the story of Rhyging, a real-life Jamaican outlaw and folk hero who was notorious when Perry was young. It captivated everybody in Jamaica at the time. He thought this would be a good vehicle, and so that was the beginning of The Harder They Come. But when Jimmy was cast, the character became a singer. Jimmy’s casting was integral to the development of the story, and the film came to mirror Jimmy’s own life story as a country boy coming to town and going through the whole studio and recording process.

Can you talk about how impactful The Harder They Come was for reggae music at large?: Huge. The Harder They Come—the movie and the soundtrack—and Bob Marley going on tour took reggae to the world, no doubt at all. And because of the diversity of the tracks on the album—it’s not just one artist or one tone—it’s the perfect reggae introduction sampler for anybody. The Slickers’ “Johnny Too Bad” and Cliff’s “Sitting in Limbo” could not be more different tonally, but they work beautifully together. The album was inducted into the Library of Congress in the U.S. in 2021, only the second reggae album to ever receive that honor, after Bob Marley’s Burnin’. Also, people don’t realize that there’s no score to The Harder They Come, because the soundtrack makes you not miss its absence. That was one of the beautiful aspects of Perry’s filmmaking, which is also found in No Place Like Home—there is no score, and you do not miss it. Perry was brilliant in many ways. He was an actor’s director, coaxing performances out of people with no acting experience at all, and he was brilliant at using music and sounds to build a mood.

Tell me about the story behind No Place Like Home, your father’s follow-up to The Harder They Come.: Perry embarked on No Place Like Home very soon after the release of The Harder They Come—well, as soon as he could, because it took him years to get The Harder They Come distributed, and he had to do it himself around the world. Once he was able to take a break and reflect, he came to feel that The Harder They Come wasn’t as authentic or as verité as it could have been, even though in my opinion it really was! He wanted to take a positive step further with No Place Like Home. It was very hard for him to find investment, because The Harder They Come had not made its money back at that point, and here he was wanting to be even more experimental. But he had three stories in his mind that he always wanted to tell. One was about the country boy who comes to town, which in this case was Kingston [The Harder They Come]; the second was about the city woman who comes to the country, which is No Place Like Home. A New York ad executive, Susan [Susan O’Meara] comes to Jamaica to film a commercial, and the movie follows the journey of discovery that she embarks on while she is traveling through Jamaica. His third story, which he ended up writing as a novel, is Power Game (1998), where the city and the country clash.

The making of No Place Like Home had many stops and starts, and he didn’t have enough money to store the negative. It was shot on celluloid, which had to be stored properly in an air-conditioned facility. He asked somebody to store it for him in New York, and when he went to retrieve it, the storage facility showed him a film that was not his. It was actually a porn film, and he said, “No, no, that’s not mine.” Again, this was celluloid: there was no backup on a hard drive like there would be today. It broke his heart, and he gave up on film because he could not recreate what he had captured, and it was terrifying to him that he could ever feel that pain again.

Many, many years later, when I was working with him on some other projects, I called around storage facilities in New Jersey, and everybody told me that they didn’t have anything. But, years after that, Island Records was sold to Polygram, which was sold to Universal, and they did an inventory of all their assets, and it came up as belonging to Island Records. Through that process, they found that it wasn’t their asset and that it was Perry’s. We were able to recover the footage, which thankfully did not have vinegar syndrome. Perry was able to view the footage, do an insert shoot, and make a work-in-progress draft that was shown at Toronto Film Festival in September 2006. He passed away after a six-year battle with cancer in November of that year. We really feel that he gave up fighting because he had seen No Place Like Home, finally, on a screen, with an audience. And he felt he could go. We were supposed to go, as a family, to show it in Jamaica for the first time in November, and he died the night before. We went ahead, we took it, and we showed it in his honor. After that process, the film went through a long period of restoration, and we did deals to license the music. There were two gentlemen, David Garonzik and Arthur Gorson, who worked tirelessly on getting the film to the point where it can be shown on the Criterion Channel, and we are beyond thrilled that there is a platform where people can find this gem.

No Place Like Home is not a “reggae film” in the vein of The Harder They Come, and yet reggae music features prominently on the soundtrack. One of the most memorable sequences, a romantic encounter between Susan and her driver friend Carl [Carl Bradshaw], features Bob Marley and the Wailers’ classic track “Stir It Up.” Was it a challenge to license Marley’s music?: It was the Marley family who helped us get everything else. [Bob and Rita Marley’s daughter] Cedella Marley agreed to a very reasonable license deal, so we were able to go to other people and say, “The Marleys have agreed to this, so will you, based on the history of the film?” That is how we were able to finance the music. It’s an incredible soundtrack, with Bob Marley, John Denver, and Etta James.

Do you have any special, personal memories of these films?: I have two. One is from the making of The Harder They Come, when I was very young and wandered onto the set where they were filming the brutal scene of Jimmy being beaten by the authorities—this was not such a good idea! For No Place Like Home, my main memory is going on the road with my father, my mother, and my brother, like we were on holiday going around Jamaica. The crew and the cast were our family. If you look carefully, you will catch a glimpse of my brother and me on bicycles. My first on-screen film credit!

As Sure as the Sun Will Shine: Justine Henzell on The Harder They Come at Fifty

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