Flashback: It's midnight at the Orson Welles Cinema, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980. Perry Henzell's breakthrough Jamaican film "The Harder They Come" has been playing here every weekend for nearly a decade now, but tonight it's still a full house. As the lights go down, the audience sparks up, and within a good 10 minutes the room is stewing in a haze of pungent ganja smoke and fine reggae music.
More than four decades later, I wonder, why? Not why people went to see the film — it's a fierce tale of injustice avenged, based on a Jamaican ghetto outlaw/folk hero from the 1940s, but set in the '70s reggae scene, and it boasts a legendary soundtrack including The Maytals' "Pressure Drop," The Slickers' "Johnny Too Bad" and several hits sung by the film's star, Jimmy Cliff. In fact, "Harder" played an integral role in breaking reggae music outside Jamaica; even Bob Marley followed in its footsteps, touring many of the same American theaters that screened the film.
No, I'm not wondering why they saw the film. The question is: Why did people keep going to see it weekend after weekend? Yes, it was to dope-smokers what "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" was to cross-dressers — a chance to flaunt your vice in public, to show strength in numbers that The Man couldn't touch — but more than that, it was an attitude.