MrOllie
I saw this film in 1970 at the ABC cinema in Hull, East Yorks and really enjoyed it. I recall that the cinema was pretty empty at the time so a lot of folk missed out on a treat. Richard Harris as the undercover detective and Sean Connery as the leader of the group of saboteur's' give a very good account of themselves. Although Harris comes to admire the group, he is ambitious and looking to better his life,therefore, this does not stop him eventually betraying them. Samantha Eggar is adequate as the love interest for Harris. The film is very realistic and you can almost smell the coal dust in the mining scenes.I enjoyed the soundtrack so much by Henry Mancini that I bought the vinyl LP and still have it today. An excellent film!!
chaos-rampant
This is one of the great immigrant movies; it speaks in a manner simple and concise about what it means to be the outsider, to be used and abused and your voice never heard, to be at the bottom of the barrel looking up. It speaks about despair violence and moral devastation in the Pennsylvania coal mines of 1876, about right and wrong, law and ethos, and their flipsides, violence and anarchy. The movie's characters have amazingly human needs, some of them to be heard in that shanty town of Pennsylvania and others to get away from it. Richard Harris plays one of the most fascinating complex characters I've seen. I love his type of character so much because he's the villain, the one we must boo, but he doesn't give a damn about our booing, he doesn't look for absolution or forgiveness in the end. I like characters who have what it takes to be the bad guy.He's paid to infiltrate a radical group of coalworkers, The Molly Maguires, find out who they are and give them up. For a time he sympathizes with their cause, he goes down to the coal mines and comes out with the same paste of coaldust grime and sweat on his face and gets paid 24 cents a week for it, but when he needs to name names he does so without flinching. Like the Irish coal miners he mingles with, he's a man "at the bottom of the barrel", but unlike them, he wants to be at the top of the barrel looking down. He finds love, his boarding lady who's desperate to get out of that coaldusted hellhole, a woman of strict ethics who wants decency and lawfulness. He tells her that "you buy decency and respectability like you buy a loaf of bread", so that he recognizes the futility of the Mollies' struggle and can't help to be drawn to it, to that fleeting sparkle of futile human defiance against injustice. But that's not the movie's meridian, although it feels so at the time. A little later we get a magnificent discussion in a tavern, during a wake, between himself and Sean Connery, brooding leader of the Mollies', where Richard Harris tells him that he'll never die, that he's going to live forever.It struck me like a brick, like reading Judge Holden speak to his scalphunter comrades in Blood Meridian around a campfire in the middle of the desert, because essentially and metaphorically, that is true; everybody else will pass away, the men who struggle and fight oppression and the men who die "without making a pip", but Richard Harris will live forever. He's deceit everlasting, the cosmic trickster. During their trial, when the prosecutor against the Mollies' calls for the first witness, a door to an adjacent room opens and we see Richard Harris calmly playing cards with the police captain, a man he has nothing but contempt for. In the end, there's neither punishment nor forgiveness for him, he's beyond all that, a little above and beyond everything else, damnation and vengeance, beyond even love or self-pity, human compassion and regret too. In the end he walks by a newly erected scaffold being tested by prison wardens, and he simply walks away never looking back. He's not even going away to Denver, Colorado, to be in charge of a detective agency there, he goes beyond that, [...] he never sleeps, he says that he will never die, he dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favourite, he never sleeps, he says that he will never die. Perfect.What's not perfect is the bogus score by Henry Mancini, basically upbeat irish folk reworkings. Maybe 16 Horsepower should redo this one.
Milan
The Molly Maguires is a movie which has become better over the years. I am surprised that it was commercially unsuccessful in it's day, since it's absolutely no worse than similar movies of those years such as "Ryan's daughter", "Emperor of the north", or much appraised movies of later years like "Matewan", which explores the same topic of conflict between oppressed working class and the system that's exploiting them. This film is beautifully photographed, and the acting is brilliant, especially from Richard Harris and Sean Connery. The sets are magnificent, and the viewer can feel and sympathize with the burden of the coal miners and their families working and struggling against the system that is grinding them down, and that they can not change, even if they give their lives in the course of that struggle. This film deserved much more and I just think that this is a classic that has to be recognized. 9/10
bkoganbing
According to the Films of Sean Connery, the genesis of The Molly Maguires was a visit to the set of Director Martin Ritt;s Hombre in which Connery's then wife Diane Cilento was in the cast. Ritt had the idea for The Molly Maguires back then and asked Connery if he'd give him the commitment. Connery was intrigued and said yes. But it took over four years to get the project rolling.The Molly Maguires has the ring of authenticity to it because Martin Ritt chose to shoot it in an almost abandoned Pennsylvania coal town of Ecksley. Filming the story in a place where the Molly Maguires were active lends a lot of credibility to the film. The Mollys were a secret cell within the Catholic fraternal society of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The Irish immigrants spread all over America and a good deal of them arrived in the Pennsylvania coal country where they became miners. A trade not unknown in Ireland as that country has considerable deposits of the stuff. The workers were terribly exploited, having to live in the company town, buy at the company store, and pay for damaged equipment. That together with the health problems we know now about in the mining industry.There was no organized labor movement yet and the Mollys were at times the only protections those miners had. They'd be considered terrorists now, but an important thing to remember is that unlike today's terrorists, their acts of violence were never random.One thing I did like was the fact that the company policeman were Protestant and Welsh. That was the generation who were the previous people in the mines. The next generation of coal miners were from Eastern Europe, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. The ethnic conflicts are quite explicit in this film.Richard Harris plays James McParlan another Irish immigrant sent by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate and destroy the Mollys. Connery is Jack Kehoe the leader of them and very suspicious of Harris when he first arrives to work at the mines. The story as told in the film sticks pretty close to the truth of what happened in Pennsylvania in the 1870s. Informers are not a group that's looked up to in any culture, but the Irish traditionally do have a special disdain for them.The film is a clash between two men, Harris who wants to rise in class and willing to sell anyone out to do it and Connery whose methods maybe wrong, but has the genuine interest of his fellow miners at heart. After the business in Pennsylvania is concluded and after the action of this film, the real McParlan rose high in the Pinkerton agency, but his name was an anathema among his own people.The Molly Maguires is a well crafted piece of cinema that unfortunately failed to find an audience back in 1970. Today it's considered a masterpiece and deservedly so.
