The Harder They Come took a while to become a sensation; there's an apocryphal story that because the movie used Jamaican patois, it was the first English-language movie to require subtitles. Shot in 1971 and released the following year, it featured Jimmy Cliff as Ivan, the country boy whose life slips into crime as he hustles to get a deal as a singer. It was shot on one camera, and this scene, featured after the panel, is set in the studio where Ivan sings the title song.
(A colleague of mine once remarked that every American's music collection seemed to feature two reggae albums (or CDs): The Marley collection Legend and The Harder Them Come, the soundtrack of the movie). The musicians seem bemused: in the recording booth, actor Bob Charlton plays the menacing producer Hilton, while Leslie Kong was in fact a real producer, who recorded Jimmy Cliff. Many people remark that the film's studio recording is even better than the "real" version - Cliff is singing like his life depends on it, and after a while the musicians start to jam along with Cliff, the guitar riffing heavily on the rhythm. Cliff was already a professional singer, a bigger star in Jamaica than Bob Marley, and he contributed two more tracks to the soundtrack, including 'Sitting Here in Limbo' and 'Many Rivers to Cross'. (The sublime 'Sitting Here in Limbo', with its gorgeous keyboard intro, was recorded not in Kingston, but in Muscle Shoals, Tennessee, a small town that has a place in reggae history).
Chris Blackwell was one of the movie' backers: Jamaicans were thrilled to see their own lives, in their own dialect, depicted on screen. The soundtrack was a hit, and the movie pushed Jimmy Cliff into international stardom. He soon left Island Records, but not longer afterwards, the Wailers - a little dispirited after touring around the UK in a van - walked into Blackwell's office in London, looking for a deal. The rest, as we say...
