| "The Molly Maguires" is based on actual events which occurred in the coal mining districts of North- Eastern Pennsylvania during the 1870s, a period of great unrest in the American mining industry. The causes of this unrest were complex, and involved ethnic and religious factors as well as purely economic ones. Most of the miners had been recruited from Britain or Ireland, and there was constant tension between the mainly Catholic Irish miners and those from mainland Britain, especially Wales, who were mostly Protestants. There are few coalmines in Ireland, so the Irish miners <more> tended to have little previous experience of the industry and hence found themselves employed in unskilled, low-paid jobs.In some respects, American miners of this period were better off than their British counterparts. The film was shot on location in a genuine 19th-century mining community in Eckley, Pennsylvania, and the solid detached wooden houses provided by the mining company are far more spacious than the cramped brick terraces which would have formed a typical mining village in contemporary Britain. Nevertheless, the work was hard and dangerous and poorly paid; at first sight the wages seemed generous enough, but so much was taken off in various fines and deductions that the miners were often left out-of-pocket. Moreover, wages were paid in tokens which could only be exchanged at the company store, a practice which would have been illegal in Britain, where workers could insist on being paid in coin of the realm.As the film opens, we learn that the miners have recently been on strike in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain better pay and conditions, but have been forced back to work by starvation. Another factor, apparently, was attacks on striking miners by local anti-Catholic or anti-immigrant vigilantes . Despairing of being able to obtain justice by conventional industrial action, a group of Irish miners have set up a chapter of the Molly Maguires, a secret society which uses terrorist methods to achieve its aims, including sabotage and the murder of hardline coal owners or mine officials. The film tells the story of James McParlan, a former miner turned detective who is employed by the coal owners to infiltrate the society.When the film came out in 1970 it was considered a major box-office failure, despite being made on a big budget for its time and having two major stars in Richard Harris as McParlan and Sean Connery as Jack Kehoe, the leader of the Molly Maguires. Perhaps the American public during the Nixon era were not interested in a movie about working-class characters which was made from a left-wing standpoint by a director, Martin Ritt, who had been blacklisted in the fifties for his alleged Communist affiliations. Another factor which might have alienated American viewers is that, unusually for a film set in America, all the leading parts are played by British or Irish actors . Ritt and his scriptwriter Walter Bernstein also blacklisted do not condone the terrorist methods of the "Mollies", and an important character is the Catholic priest who reminds his flock that violence is contrary to the ideals of their Christian faith. There can, however, be no doubt that the film's sympathies are with the hard-working miners struggling to make a decent living rather than with their grasping, stony-hearted employers.The acting is very good. The film was made at a time when Sean Connery had temporarily relinquished his Bond role to George Lazenby although he would briefly reclaim it the following year in "Diamonds are Forever" and was looking to widen his range as an actor, and a gritty social drama like "The Molly Maguires" is about as different a film as one can get from glossy action-adventures like the Bonds. Connery's accent sometimes sounds more Scottish than Irish, but I doubt if many American viewers would have noticed this, and he gives a performance of great power and sincerity, one of his best in a non-Bond film. Richard Harris is perhaps even better than Connery, portraying McParlan as a man torn between his own self-advantage and a certain sympathy with the miners' cause. There is another good contribution from Frank Finlay as Davies, the Welsh-born police officer who acts as McParlan's controller.The film is also visually beautiful. Ritt had originally intended to make it in black-and-white, but was dissuaded from doing so by the studio; the advent of colour television had generally made black-and-white films uneconomic by 1970. It was therefore made in quiet, muted colours appropriate to its subject-matter and to the grimy, soot-blackened appearance of the area. Using this limited palette, Ritt is able to achieve a stark, sombre grandeur; particularly notable is the wordless opening sequence of around fifteen minutes. There is also a fine soundtrack composed by Henry Mancini."The Molly Maguires" was not a success when it first came out, and even today seems to be little-known. Mine is only the twenty-seventh comment it has received . Yet in my view this is a fine film, one like Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" also set in the late 19th century and told from a left-wing viewpoint which deserves to be remembered for its artistic merits rather than for the money it lost at the box-office. 8/10 <less> |
