The Harder They Come was shown four times on the BBC, the first back in 1994 as part of Alex Cox's excellent MovieDrome series. I first caught it when it was shown in August 2002, to celebrate 40 years of Jamaican independence. Revisiting it 17 years later makes me realise just how a movie can change depending on editing and your own personal perception.
The IMDb lists some cuts to the DVD version, including removal of frontal nudity, a dinner scene, some more bicycle fixing, and Ivan watching Jimmy Cagney in the cinema. Yet it was more than that. The version seen on DVD presents an egomaniac who just wants notoriety, but I remembered the film as him being more sympathetic, and pushed into a life of crime against his will.
It seems as if this isn't a misremembering on my part, as reviewer Atunik posted that "the original revolutionary message of the movie has been hacked out and distorted, and the hero has been turned into an unsympathetic criminal. Scenes are missing and some altered, and the feeling of the film has gone from Robin Hood (protector of the poor and driven to violence by severe oppression) to Bonnie and Clyde (natural born criminals with no regard for human life)."
However, it's not just this unfortunate reframing of events that caused a new experience, but possibly also my own initial interpretation of the movie. It ends in a gunfight where Ivan is killed, as audience members in a cinema laugh and cheer. While I had recalled (possibly mistakenly) that they actually see him on the cinema screen, that isn't in the DVD version, instead it cuts between Ivan and the audience as two separate entities.
A reading of plot summaries suggests that the audience is all in Ivan's head, his self-aggrandising imaginings. While such an ending is worthwhile, I had originally interpreted it much differently. I had thought that the film had ended up as a film-within-a-film, a moment of meta content in a movie that, while ambitious, wouldn't be expected to feature such high concept conceits. That one man's struggle to stay alive under hardship features in another reality where his death is just meaningless entertainment. It seems my own misreading of the film, all those years ago, produced a version in my mind that was arguably better than the real thing.
Despite all this, it's still a very strong film, the opening parts shot almost in a Cinéma vérité (French for "we haven't got much money so passersby look into the camera") style, and the concept of a mass murderer becoming a lauded public figure is a deeply interesting piece of social commentary.
The IMDb lists some cuts to the DVD version, including removal of frontal nudity, a dinner scene, some more bicycle fixing, and Ivan watching Jimmy Cagney in the cinema. Yet it was more than that. The version seen on DVD presents an egomaniac who just wants notoriety, but I remembered the film as him being more sympathetic, and pushed into a life of crime against his will.
It seems as if this isn't a misremembering on my part, as reviewer Atunik posted that "the original revolutionary message of the movie has been hacked out and distorted, and the hero has been turned into an unsympathetic criminal. Scenes are missing and some altered, and the feeling of the film has gone from Robin Hood (protector of the poor and driven to violence by severe oppression) to Bonnie and Clyde (natural born criminals with no regard for human life)."
However, it's not just this unfortunate reframing of events that caused a new experience, but possibly also my own initial interpretation of the movie. It ends in a gunfight where Ivan is killed, as audience members in a cinema laugh and cheer. While I had recalled (possibly mistakenly) that they actually see him on the cinema screen, that isn't in the DVD version, instead it cuts between Ivan and the audience as two separate entities.
A reading of plot summaries suggests that the audience is all in Ivan's head, his self-aggrandising imaginings. While such an ending is worthwhile, I had originally interpreted it much differently. I had thought that the film had ended up as a film-within-a-film, a moment of meta content in a movie that, while ambitious, wouldn't be expected to feature such high concept conceits. That one man's struggle to stay alive under hardship features in another reality where his death is just meaningless entertainment. It seems my own misreading of the film, all those years ago, produced a version in my mind that was arguably better than the real thing.
Despite all this, it's still a very strong film, the opening parts shot almost in a Cinéma vérité (French for "we haven't got much money so passersby look into the camera") style, and the concept of a mass murderer becoming a lauded public figure is a deeply interesting piece of social commentary.