Noutions Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

MusicChat It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

kai ringler I liked the film as a whole,, my grandfather worked in the mines in Pennsylvania in the 1920's-1950's . so I decided to check this one out. Sean Connery is stellar in his performance as the leader of our little terrorist group,, the workers at the mines are being treated unfairly and a lot of their pay is being kept from them like equipment used to dig up the coal which is highly unfair I think.. a new man comes to the crew but he actually is a detective sent in to blend in with the terrorist group,, and report back to the police with any findings that he has.. oddly enough he is Irish, so now you have to wander where his loyalties really are going to lie,, is it gonna be with the police,, because they do have the upper hand with our "detective", or will he stick with his "roots" and go with the terrorists.. pretty decent movie.

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.

James Hitchcock "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 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

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.