LEFT: FILE
Perry Henzell - 1980s.
RIGHT: Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer
Founder and artistic director of Calabash, Colin Channer (left), with film-maker Perry Henzell at The Calabash launch, held on March 11, 2005. The first of four discussions in the Calabash Literary Festival took place last weekend at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, UWI, Mona.

Howard Campbell, Gleaner Writer

IN the summer of 1973, Lennie Little-White was a film student at the Ryerson Polytechnic University in Canada, when he went to a theatre at Danforth Street to see a movie named The Harder They Come.

What he saw further fuelled his ambition to become a film-maker.

"The lines were so long it stretched around the corner, everybody wanted to see it," Mr. Little-White, who heads Mediamix Limited in Kingston, told The Sunday Gleaner last week. "It was the first time a lot of us (Jamaicans) were seeing ourselves on screen."

The Harder They Come was writer/director/producer Perry Henzell's little film. Henzell died last Thursday in St. Elizabeth at age 70 after a long battle with cancer.

In a 1995 interview with The Gleaner, Henzell said he was tired of talking about the film that brought him global fame. He had other big projects on his plate, including making a movie based on his book, Power Game, and a bio-pic on Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey.

Different interests

"He loved the movie, but he wanted to talk about Cane, Power Game and politics," said his daughter Justine. "He didn't only want to be seen just as the person who wrote The Harder They Come."

Interestingly, No Place Like Home, an unheralded Henzell film, premiered at the Flashpoint Film Festival, which opened Friday in Negril, Westmoreland.

Paul Bucknor, one of the festival's organisers, paid tribute to Henzell.

"Perry has always been a friend and a mentor to Jamaican film-makers, he set the standard for us as film-makers in Jamaica," said Bucknor. "Perry had been a patron saint to Flashpoint and it is a honour to be premiering his last film, No Place Like Home."

To some, The Harder They Come was an unlikely winner. It was based on corruption in Jamaica's burgeoning music business, and poverty and crime in Kingston's ghettos.

What did Henzell, a white Jamaican who attended the prestigious McGill University in Canada, know about this?

Henzell, a former advertising executive, said he had grown tired of making commercials and was determined to make a movie based on the life of Ivanhoe 'Rhygin' Martin, the badman from Linstead who caused mayhem in parts of Kingston in the late 1940s.

"I grew up on Caymanas Estates and I remember as a boy hearing that Rhygin was hiding out from the police in the swamps," Henzell told The Gleaner nine years ago.

The Harder They Come, he revealed, cost $400,000 to make and was shot throughout Kingston. Jimmy Cliff, a reggae singer with a growing reputation in the United Kingdom, was cast as Ivan, the movie's lead; Janet Barclay was his love interest; Basil Keane as the preacher; Winston Stona as the corrupt cop; and Carl Bradshaw, a former track athlete, was cast as Jose.

Henzell said although The Harder They Come was a hit with critics for its raw depiction of urban life in Jamaica, it was never a box office smash. With a just-as infectious soundtrack, it helped put Reggae music on the map internationally and won Jamaican pop culture new fans.

Among them was a Vietnam veteran from New York City named Roger Steffens.

"Perry Henzell's contribution to the spread of Jamaican musical culture is incalculable," Steffens told The Sunday Gleaner from Los Angeles. "The Harder They Come crystallised a crucial moment in time, fixing it forever in the world's consciousness. He took the particularities of a small island's 'livity', and revealed them as universals, relevant to people of every race and nationality."

It was not all movies with Perry Henzell; he had a social conscience as well. He was part of an influential middle-class group that helped bring Michael Manley to power in 1972. At the time, he said he was impressed by Manley's promise to improve the lives of average Jamaicans.

Henzell scored some of the People's National Party's (PNP) campaign ads and filmed the musical motorcade that accompanied Manley across the country. In a 2002 interview for his book, Cane, Henzell said he fell out with the PNP in 1974 when Manley declared Democratic Socialism as the path of his Government.

For all his travels, Justine Henzell said Perry Henzell remained a committed husband to Sally, his wife of 41 years, and father to her brother Jason and sister Toni-Ann.

"He was always travelling to make money to make us comfortable. I never felt that he wasn't there," she said.

The Harder They Come's legend continues to grow. This summer, a musical based on the film closed on the London stage and in September Henzell attended the screening of a new print of the movie in Los Angeles.

Last year, Hip-O Records re-issued The Harder They Come soundtrack to enthusiastic response.