The Molly Maguires

Molly Maguires (1970)

Plot In A Paragraph: A terrorist group known as the Molly Maguires has been sabotaging a coal mine in Pennsylvania where they in fact work. Detective James McParlan (Richard Harris) must infiltrate the group led by John Kehoe (Connery) Throughout the film McParlan's allegiances are tested. Will he side with the Maguires and become a true member, or keep his mission in mind and bring an end to the group??

This for me is Connery's best performance to date. I personally think he is brilliant here!! But once again audiences and the Academy did not care, and ignored the movie. Richard Harris (billed above Connery, even though Connery was paid more and was the bigger star) is a funny actor to me, I've never really taken to him, there was just always something about him I didn't like, but I can't fault his work here.

The movie is so powerful (at least to me) and deserves to be seen as it's filled with fantastic performances. The first line of dialogue doesn't come till about 15 minutes in, with Connery not speaking until about the 40th minute despite being one of the first characters introduced on screen. Director Martin Ritt wanted to film this in black and white, but Paramount were worried it would put off movie goers.

Molly Maguires was another Connery movie to fail at the box office, and it failed in a big way, grossing only $2 million at the domestic box office on a budget of $11 million.

A must-see for any Irish-American. Harris is superb in his role as an undercover Pinkerton investigator. We see his character grow to admire the maguires even though he knows he will eventually betray them. Connery is also great as the attractive leader of the terrorist group. This movie touches on an area tha is often ignored, working conditions in 19th Century America. I especially like the American Football/Rugby hybrid they play against the Welsh town. A unique movie that let's us see both Harris and Connery shine. Good score, pacing, photography, and supporting characters as well. One of my favs!

Having been born and raised in the area this picture was filmed in,naturally I feel a bond to it. Add to that the fact that Richard Harris,one of my favorite actors stars in the film,and its a must see for me. Looking past that the film is riviting. Harris and Connery carry the film as the Cat and Mouse in this Coal town saga each playing to their professional strengths while adding a bit of their own to the roles. The supporting cast is just as strong,particularly the lovely and talented Samantha Eggar and the underused shakespearean actor Frank Finley.

On a personal note,two of my early mentors in theatre,J. Gerald Godwin and Jane Tomassetti have small roles in the film as the Paymaster and Miliner respectivley.

To sum it up..Molly McGuires is a film that you can sink your teeth into..and no matter which side of the conflict you find yourself on you can see what it was that drove men to do what they did.This film will not fail to keep you on the edge of your seat and make you think in the process.

Adaptation of Arthur H. Lewis' book, which was based on actual accounts, about a Pennsylvania coal-mining town in 1876 and the secret group of rebels who are sabotaging the mines. Stranger-in-town Richard Harris is actually a detective sent there to ferret out the culprits. Downbeat story might have stood some tightening (and possibly a little mood-lightening levity), but is otherwise quite good. Director Martin Ritt works exceptionally well with his cast, getting a terrific, surprisingly low-keyed performance out of Harris in particular; scaling back his high voltage nature, Harris is even approachable enough to make the romance sub-plot between he and Samantha Eggar rather sweet. Sean Connery is sturdy as always, and the colorful supporting cast includes Frank Finlay and Anthony Zerbe, an intriguing character actor who pops up in a myriad of '70's films. **1/2 from ****

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.