8/10
Director: Martin Ritt (Hud, Hombre, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Norma Rae)
Starring Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Samantha Eggar, Frank Finlay
The film is set in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town in the 1870s where Irish immigrants work in hazardous conditions, live in stark shanties, and watch out as they plan revenge. The title comes from an actual secret society, with some lineage to rebels in Ireland, who sabotaged mines and assassinated bosses. The characters played by Richard Harris and Sean Connery are actual as well.
The police send Harris to infiltrate the Molly Maguires. He works alongside and befriends Connery who we learn is the leader of the secret society. Harris falls in love with a woman who runs a boarding house and yearns to escape. Working for the authorities but toiling in the mines, Harris becomes sympathetic toward the laborers but not enough to deter him from doing his job. He’s successful. The film shows the Mollies as unlikely to achieve anything. In that respect it differs from Ritt’s more famous labor film, Norma Rae. They do what they do to express their human worth and not die worn-down old men who didn’t put up a fight.
There are fine performances from Connery and Harris – perhaps their best – and from Frank Finlay, the dogged policeman, and Samantha Eggear, the woman who falls for Harris but cannot leave town with a traitor.
Filming was done in an old mining town that’s now a museum of sorts. The houses, stores, walkways, and taverns are largely unchanged from the nineteenth century. The same holds for the mine and equipment. There are powerful scenes of workers walking to work at daybreak, drinking in taverns afterwards, attending Sunday services, and holding vigil for a deceased elder. All this is masterfully captured by director Martin Ritt and cinematographer James Wong Howe who give the film remarkable texture and beauty.
©2024 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to fellow Hoya Susan Ganosellis.