“You Ti'ink Hero Can Dead – Til De Las' Reel?”

Home , Jimmy Cliff, The Harder They Come

“You ti’ink hero can dead – til de las’ reel?” Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come and Sergio Corbucci’s Django1

MARIA CRISTINA FUMAGALLI

ERRY HENZELL’S FILM The Harder They Come (1972), star- ring the reggae singer Jimmy Cliff, has become a cult movie and P continues to hold the interest of many cultural theorists, film critics and film lovers. In 1980 Michael Thelwell published a novel inspired by the film with which it shares its title while the movie, accompanied by commentaries by Perry Henzell and Jimmy Cliff, was released on DVD in 2000. Some critics have praised the film highly for its use of nation language,2 for its editing, and for its musical soundtrack,3 while others have criticized it for its (allegedly) defeatist realist narrative4 or its exploitation

1 In a recent article, Loretta Collins has argued that Rhone’s role in the drafting and redrafting of the film script should be clarified “if we wish to have an accurate record of how the first full-length Jamaican classic film was produced.” Collins, “The Harder They Come: Rougher Version,” Small Axe 13 (2003): 71. For the purpose of this essay (and for the sake of brevity), I will therefore refer to The Harder They Come as Perry Henzell’s film, being fully aware that mine could only be a provisional and partial attribution. 2 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Lan- guage in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London & Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1984): 41, and Gordon Rohlehr, “An Award Winning Film About Jamaica Today … In The Language of Kingston Streets,” Tapia (17 June 1973). 3 Bev Braune, “‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’: Viewing The Harder They Come Again and Again after a 1977 Interview with Director Perry Henzell,” Wasafiri 26 (1997): 31–36. 4 Gladstone L. Yearwood, “Myth and Signification in Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come,” in The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, The Caribbean and Canada, ed. Alvina Ruprecht & Cecilia Taiana (Ottawa, Ontario: Carleton UP, 1995): 437–55. 398 MARIA CRISTINA FUMAGALLI ½¾ of reggae for white consumption.5 In this essay I will focus on the much- neglected intertextual connection between The Harder They Come and Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), a spaghetti western quoted in two crucial scenes of Henzell’s film. I will argue that the presence of Django has the function of enhancing the film’s ideology, empowering its audience(s) while turning Ivan, the protagonist of the film, into a ‘warrior of the imagination’ and not into a “desperado of the imagination,” as Michael Thelwell claims in his novelization of the film.6 According to the director, Perry Henzell, the film was made for “Jamaica and for slum-dwellers everywhere” and only slowly did it gain an interna- tional audience. Henzell claims that the film was made with a specific audience in mind: namely, the “Carib audience” (the Carib was a theatre in Kingston which later burned down).7 The audience did appreciate the ‘gift’: at the Kingston premiere on 5 June 1972 over 6,000 people invaded the cinema and some 3,000 more were encamped outside.8 Ironically, Trevor Rhone, Henzell’s collaborator, was unable to attend the première of The Harder They Come, because he could not get closer than fifty yards from the besieged cinema.9 The Daily Gleaner reported that the multitude forced the manager to cancel the official ceremony. Prime Minister Michael Man- ley and other guests of honour were unable to attend “after pandemonium broke loose.”10 Edward Kamau Brathwaite commented thus on the premiere of the film and on its cultural significance for Jamaica:

the traditional ‘order of service’ was reversed. Instead of the elite, [...] the multitude took over [...] and demanded that they see what they had wrought. ‘For the first time at last’ it was the people (the raw material) not the ‘critics’, who decided the criteria of praise, the measure and ground of qualification; ‘for the first time at last’, a local face, a native ikon, a nation language voice was hero. In this small corner of our world, a revolution as significant as Emancipation.11

5 Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987; London: Routledge, 1992): 169. 6 Michael Thelwell, The Harder They Come (London: X Press, 1980), 203. 7 Perry Henzell, “The islandlife interview with Perry Henzell” (March 1998): http://www .islandlife.com/thtc/perryinterview.html (accessed 5 July 2001). 8 Keith Q. Warner, On Location: Cinema and Film in the Anglophone Caribbean (London: Macmillan, 2000): 76. 9 Collins, “The Harder They Come: Rougher Version,” 61. 10 “Premiere of Film Marred,” Daily Gleaner (6 June 1972): 1, quoted in Collins, “The Harder They Come: Rougher Version,” 61. 11 Brathwaite, The History of the Voice, 41.