"The Molly Maguires" wasn't received with much enthusiasm when it went out on release in 1970. Director Martin Ritt claimed the film damaged his professional reputation and Sean Connery was confirmed as being box office poison. This isn't the most glamorous or flamboyant of films but it isn't meant to be. Anyone expecting any of that is bound to be disappointed. This movie sets out to present an example of how life tended to be back in the 1870s and it succeeds remarkably. In addition, "The Molly Maguires" is based upon real people and real incidents at a small mining community in the United States. Richard Harris and Sean Connery complement each other to perfection. They are both well cast as typically rugged, tough characters and their many scenes together ignite the film. According to various reports, both actors got on very well and I think this shows in the final results. The supporting cast is a bit of a mixture: Samantha Eggar, Frank Finlay and Anthony Zerbe amongst others. You don't come across a cast like that too often! The viewer is spared nothing when it comes to the lengths that the miners are willing to go to in order to resist and to defy the horrendous working conditions to which they are subjected. Sean Connery offers another example of how he is worth FAR more than just playing Bond. He has some brilliant dialogue to get his acting teeth into as do the rest of the cast. He plays the leader of the said secret society with power and with depth. Connery knows he needs to employ rather harsh tactics in order to make his point. However, it doesn't necessarily mean he enjoys using them. Richard Harris gives a good performance as the undercover police officer whose job it is to infiltrate the secret society. Before long, he will become embroiled within his own personal conflict. The location that was chosen for the film, works most effectively. Observing the place that was used, I could actually envision there being a mining community from all those years before. The direction from Martin Ritt is assured and imaginative. He allows time for a few quite hard-edged moments and a film like "The Molly Maguires" needs them. One of my favourite scenes, is the rugby match. No CGI rubbish in those days as real human beings take the blows and the punishment. Hard-hitting in the literal sense. This movie didn't deserve to flop at the box office.

The Molly Maguires (1970) Who are the Molly Maguires? Well, they are part of some little-known American history and Irish history. To keep things short and simple, they were a secret organization of coal miners in coal-abundant locations such as Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The name came in the 1840s during a tenant protest in Ireland, but the name didn't stick until the 1860's. Working conditions were very poor for the miners and worker discrimination was prevalent. Basically this very secret organization formed as a response to these conditions and the lack of reforms. The Molly Maguires often used violence or intimidation tactics mine owners and supervisors. This little-known film, aptly named The Molly Maguires tells the story about this group towards the end, approximately in 1875 when a Pinkerton detective infiltrated the organization. I went to school in a Luzerne County, Pennsylvania where supposedly these organizations existed, so I find it awesome that a movie exists telling a story about a piece of American history that no one knows about.This is a film that not many people have seen. Whether at the time of release or today. So mark my words when I say this is a truly underrated gem. I really enjoyed the story it told and despite being a Hollywood film, I learned a lot about the subject. The film doesn't have a large cast, but it features fine work in the lead roles by two magnificent actors: Sean Connery and Richard Harris. The film also possesses strong cinematography work from James Wong Howe. The film is beautifully shot and he somehow makes the rather dreary northeastern Pennsylvania locations seem strikingly beautiful. Also playing an emotional impact on the film is the score by Henry Mancini. Music is important in the film because the opening sequence is fourteen minutes long and we don't hear any words spoken until the end of those minutes, so music was a substitute for spoken words. There are some very memorable themes in the music and they pack quite an emotional punch.Martin Ritt directs a film that takes occurs towards the demise of the Molly Maguires. The leader of this secret organization is named Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery), and his intentions are good ones. He and his and of Irish-American miners fight against the oppressive mine owners for reforms but the owners are not very cooperative. They hire a Pinkerton detective named James McParland (Richard Harris) who is assigned to go undercover as a member of the Maguires and infiltrate their secret society, but McParland must hope he truly knows what side he is on.The film doesn't feature a big cast despite it's rather high eleven million dollar budget (very expensive by 1970's standards). But it does have two huge movie stars in Connery and Harris. Despite this being somewhat of a small film, they deliver amazing performances. Connery is one of the greatest actors ever to live and he brought his A-game here as the violent, charismatic leader of the Maguires. Harris, on the other hand, plays a soft-spoken detective who successfully undermines the organization and he essentially sacrifices his dignity and personality to bring the members of the organization to justice. Connery and Harris have excellent chemistry together. One of my favorite scenes with the two is in one of the final scenes in the prison cell. Just seeing the two square off under different circumstances was just great to watch.The Molly Maguires is a criminally underseen movie, so you guys should see it whenever possible. It's a piece about a secret organization that plays a pivotal role in the beginning of labor unions as we know them today. If you think treatment at jobs today are bad, just watch the film to see how bad they were in the 1860's and 1870's. I don't condone the actions of the Molly Maguires, but I understand where they were coming from and why they used violence to help make their lives better. Anyhow, this is a very good movie and an underrated one too. It has fine acting, a great musical score, good direction, and beautiful cinematography. One final fact before I conclude the review is that some of the scenes were filmed in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania-about ten minutes away where I went to school.My Grade: A

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." - Frederick DouglassLoosely affiliated with radical leftists, director Martin Ritt spent several years under a Hollywood blacklist. When McCarthyism died down, and directorial reigns were returned to him, Ritt made a series of socially conscious films, most of which were about struggles for equality, or which portrayed the downtrodden in a sympathetic light.In this regard, Ritt's "The Molly Maguires" stars Sean Connery as Jack Kehoe, the leader of a secret organisation of Irish miners who seek better pay from their corporate employers during the late 1800s. Ritt has made such "pro-unionist" films before – see "Norma Rae" - but "The Molly Maguires" shoots off in unique directions. Here the Mollies use terroristic tactics to destroy factories, equipment and even people. This leads to Pinkerton Detective James McParlan (Richard Harris) going undercover and infiltrating the group. From here on, the film morphs into a gangster flick or undercover cop show, McParlan attempting to subvert the Mollies from within.Today, whilst violence reigns across capitalism's peripheries, the system's core maintains an air of manufactured tranquillity. Here, the marginalised are effortlessly swept away, demonized, demoralised or rendered invisible. From the 1860s to the 1930s, though, hardly a year passed without deadly clashes between American workers and management. At the forefront of some of these clashes were the Molly Maguires, a secret miners' society which operated in Pennsylvania. Their history stretching back to feudal Ireland, the group is rumoured to have been named after one Molly Maguire, who opposed burgeoning rental and land ownership laws. After being expelled from Ireland, the followers of Maguire found work in Pennsylvanian coal mines, but savage work conditions resulted in them hurling scorn at both weak-willed labour leaders and coal bosses. Though vilified, the Mollies improved the working conditions for miners and would be described by historians as "the first martyrs of the class struggle in the U.S." Their victories, though, were but a drop in the ocean. The ruling class quickly invented ways to subdue upheavals, creating police and/or militia forces to keep workers in check, and inventing new injunctions designed to deprive workers of their constitutional rights to freedom of speech, press, and assembly. These acts were accompanied by armed government-sponsored vigilantes, deputized citizens who enforced injunctions and who were given a green light to attack and arrest anyone suspected of participating in strike activity. Today, the First World has been beaten into compliance. The Third World, meanwhile, is pretty much as Pennsylvania was in the 1890s. That there is a (causal) relationship between capitalism's core and peripheries, between wealth and poverty, value and debt, creation and destruction, is the chief denial of neoliberal orthodoxy, a stance which is increasingly contested by modern thermo-economists, who see capitalism as a heat engine in which money is essentially a loose avatar of energy, and so subject to thermodynamic laws; you cannot get something for nothing and the total order of a 'thing' is always less than the total disorder that is created somewhere else by the 'thing's' creation, a facet which commodity fetishism conceals.Concealment is itself what "The Molly Maguires" is about; bosses want invisible workers, workers want to be heard, and both sides have foot-soldiers working in the shadows. The film's drama itself unfolds in the gaze of a giant coal sorting factory, a monstrous juggernaut which kills surrounding vegetation, and whose hands sap life out villagers, families and subterranean miners. Poetically, the factory's long tramlines recall the hill-steps of Ritt's "Hombre", another film which had an air of futility about it, men trapped in their own private Sisyphus Myths, doomed to toil. "The Molly Maguires" was shot by master cinematographer James Wong Howe. Howe bathes Ritt's film in rich blacks and browns, and captures well a tone of grim beauty, his spaces lit by dying kerosene lamps, his faces marred by soot and soil. Elsewhere the film utilises impressive sets - the best frontier sets since Altman's "Mrs Miller" - one of which is a near full-scale replica of a 19th century mining town.Interestingly, Sean Connery's character spends most of Ritt's film as a cypher, held at a distance and given very few lines. Still, with his broad shoulders and chiselled face, Connery exerts a commanding presence. Equally tough is Richard Harris, both actors large, carved from granite and sporting magnificently macho moustaches. Their relationship recalls the battles in Ritt's "The Brotherhood", "Hud" and "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold"; brothers on opposite sides of an ideological divide.Like many of Ritt's films, "The Molly Maguires" is also preoccupied with groups being infiltrated, changed or subverted. Some of these films watch as activists infiltrate and emancipate proletariat groups, others watch as Power smuggles spies into communist or unionist groups, thereby eroding them from within. Typical of Ritt, the Church is also seen to side against the working class. Also complicit are the lower classes themselves, who sacrifice brothers for lucre and who slowly internalise the values, mores and beliefs of their masters. Fittingly, "Maguires'" climax carefully juxtaposes tragedy and hope. As workers erupt into fiery violence, their impotency momentarily giving way to life-affirming ecstasy, death draws near. Final shot? A hangman's noose, one life about to be crushed so that another might climb the social ladder. Samantha Eggar co-stars.8.5/10 – Underrated. See "Viva Zapata", "Matewan" and "Bread and Roses".

A very impressive historical drama with lots of action, interesting characters and a fascinating background, brought to the screen in grand, fast-moving style by director Martin Ritt of all people (a gentleman not noted for his speed, his sensitivity, or his ability to draw memorable portraits from his players, let alone create either a riveting atmosphere or solid suspense). I tried to watch Ritt's Norma Rae (1979) once, but failed in the attempt. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965) is quite gripping, despite a surfeit of dialogue, but just about everything else Ritt had a hand in before 1970 is dead boring. He had good players too. But he didn't have the solid, suspenseful script of The Molly Maguires. True, he had worked with the brilliant cinematographer James Wong Howe on Hud and Hombre, but I didn't like these pictures. In order to enhance the stark, somber mood, Jimmy deliberately wiped any dramatic contrasts from his shots. But, in my opinion, you don't get a dark, somber mood by going all out for light and eliminating contrast. You achieve this mood with darkness and shadows – and that is exactly the way Jimmy has photographed much of The Molly Maguires. His players don't let him down either, particularly Richard Harris who comes across with flying colors in an extremely difficult role, Sean Connery as the villain you love to admire, Samantha Eggar as the girl who knows where her loyalties lie, and Frank Finlay as the policeman with ice water in his veins. Sad to say, the movie was a colossal flop on first release and torpedoed Harris' movie career. Incidentally, Kehoe wasn't hanged after all. His sentence was commuted after a public outcry and he was actually pardoned in 1979 – largely as a result of this film!