The Molly Maguires

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!

Good story line. Well played. Excellent cast, with some lesser seen actors. Enjoyed this film throughout. Constantly moving story. Historically accurate as I understand. Good example of Sean Connery's earlier (non-Bond) work.

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.

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.

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.