The Molly Maguires (Tamm Productions, Paramount, copyright 1969, released 1970)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ultimately Charles and I watched a movie I’d wanted to show him since he read a mention of it in one of my recent blog posts: The Molly Maguires, made in 1969 and released in 1970. Charles had read a book on the Molly Maguires – a group of Irish-American coal miners in the 1870’s who engaged in sabotage to protest the horrifically awful working conditions the mine owners imposed on them. But he hadn’t been aware anyone had made a movie about them until he read about it in a blog post in which I mentioned it. The Molly Maguires was very much a Zeitgeist movie, made during a period of major civil unrest in the U.S. focused largely on student activists who had come together to agitate for civil rights for African-Americans and against the war in Viet Nam. As the war dragged on for decade after decade and the final victory over American racism remained as elusive as ever, movie studios tried making films about the campus demonstrations like The Strawberry Statement, R.P.M., Zabriskie Point and Getting Straight – all of which bombed. They also looked for historical parallels so they could tell stories of radical protest without appearing to take sides on then-contemporary controversies, just as their forebears in the 1930’s had discovered Charles Dickens and filmed his stories incessantly so they could do rich vs. poor and aristocracy vs. commoners tales without actually dramatizing what was happening in the 20th century.

The Molly Maguires was also an attempt by its star, Sean Connery, to make the world forget that he’d ever played James Bond. He wanted the world’s producers and casting directors to know that he was actually an accomplished actor capable of playing a wide range of characters, including the psychiatrist in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (combining two characters from Winston Graham’s source novel) who becomes obsessed with the title character, a kleptomaniac. But at least Marnie had kept him relatively affluent and kempt; for The Molly Maguires he and the other actors playing coal miners wore faces thick with dark makeup simulating coal dust and looked as grungy and dirty as real miners. The central conflict in The Molly Maguires is between Molly Maguires leader Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery) and his friend John McKenna (Richard Harris), who – as we learn almost immediately even though Kehoe and the other Molly Maguires don’t until the very end of the film – is actually James McParland, a Pinkerton agent (though the agency is unnamed in the film) sent in to bust the Mollies and get their ringleaders hanged for murder. “McKenna” shows up with clean, unscarred hands – so the miners are immediately aware he’s never before worked in a coal mine in his life – but he picks a fight in the local miners’ bar called the “Emerald Green” and thus establishes his proletarian “street cred.” “McKenna” works his way first into the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the legal organization that’s the front group for the Mollies (and which still exists, though its main function these days is putting on St. Patrick’s Day parades), and then he’s given the full-fledged initiation into the Molly Maguires.

The film was written by Walter Bernstein and directed by Martin Ritt – the same team that were responsible for the anti-blacklist film The Front in 1976 – and Bernstein’s script makes clear that the miners had attempted to unionize and strike several years earlier, but the bosses had successfully broken their strike, slashed their already meager wages and imposed a series of “deductions” on them that reduced to pitifully small amounts even for 1875. In one particularly humiliating scene “McKenna” is told he earned $19 for the amount of coal he’s mined, but the deductions, including $2.50 per cask of the explosives used to loosen the coal so it can be mined, add up to so much he ends up with 24 cents. One of the most powerful aspects of The Molly Maguires is it vividly dramatizes just how awful coal mining is as a way to make a living – and it does so without resorting to the almost obligatory mine cave-ins just about every other movie about coal mining has contained. The filmmakers hired the legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe, who’d made his bones in the industry 50 years earlier because he figured out how to make silent star Mary Miles Minter’s blue eyes show up dark (he bounced light off a black screen and thus darkened her eyes on screen to compensate for the insensitive film stocks then in use). For The Molly Maguires he invented a special bank of lights so he could shoot inside a coal mine (or a studio simulation thereof, though most of this film was actually shot at a still-extant Pennsylvania coal mine from the period) and reproduce the “look” of one. There’s also a very au courant debate for the 1969-1970 time the film was made over whether violence is necessary for social change, including a clergyman, Father O’Connor (Philip Bourneuf), who preaches from the pulpit against any sort of violence because it will just be counterproductive.

But it’s hard to imagine what the Molly Maguires are up to because they’re blowing up their own workplaces and therefore putting themselves out of work. It seems to be motivated as much by revenge against the mine owners as anything else, and towards the end Bernstein gives Kehoe a speech indicating that he’s well aware that there will always be a few rich people exploiting the hell out of a lot of not-rich people, and all the not-rich people can do with their activism is strike back just a little. There’s also a love interest between “McKenna” and Mary Raines (Samantha Eggar), daughter of the owner of the rooming house where McKenna is staying, including one scene in which “McKenna” deliberately injures himself on the job (he crushes his fingers with a railroad switch) so he can get a few days off to take Mary to Philadelphia. (Director Ritt, writer Bernstein and cinematographer Wong Howe make Philadelphia positively glow with both natural and urban beauty; this was made before director Francis Ford Coppola and his cinematographer, Gordon Willis, hardened the past-is-brown convention of today with their work on the first two Godfather films.) Ultimately McParland “outs” himself as a detective when he shows up in court to testify against the Mollies as the state’s primary witness – and Mary is predictably disgusted with him as he invites her to move with him to his next posting, Denver. She says she once thought she’d do anything to get out of the Pennsylvania mine country, but hooking up with a Judas (a parallel cleverly made by Ritt’s staging of the actual hanging, in which Kehoe and the other two Molly Maguires leaders are hanged as a group, with Kehoe in the middle like Jesus on Golgotha) was a step too much for her. The Molly Maguires is a surprisingly slow and action-less movie – just a few acts of sabotage and bar fights, in one of which McParland’s police captain contact clubs him upside the head and draws blood just to make it look convincing – and Charles called it half historical spectacle and half film noir. But it holds up surprisingly well even though most of the descendants of the Molly Maguires today are soldiers in the Right-wing culture wars and blind supporters of Donald Trump.