The Molly Maguires

at the Astor

THE MOLLY MAGUIRES goes much farther than any motion picture in a long time in describing America's inner tensions and conflicts. A "period" film, it takes as its subject a dramatic slice of the Irish miners in Pennsylvania. It focuses on the miners at a time when they are compelled to return to work after an unsuccessful six-month strike. This is in 1876, long before American labor was bought off- at the time when the Molly Maguires were a secret revolutionary terrorist group who exploded mines and killed foremen. The mine owners sent in a detective to infiltrate and expose the Mollies. The detective caused the Mollies' downfall.

The film focuses on the detective, McParlan (Richard Harris), who becomes a Molly himself, participates in their activities, adopts their life-style and turns them in to be hung. McParlan's evilness is particularly compelling because he is a conscious and full human being rather than the kind of one-dimensional Establishment caricature that we see so often in films. As a many-faceted human being, McParlan is far more real, dangerous, and frightening than the crackers in Easy Rider the cops in Medium Cool, or the fascists in Z.

The opening shot of the sun on the horizon is reminiscent of John Ford and the parallels do not stop there. Director Martin Ritt (Hud) and writer Walter Bernstein are as successful as Ford in exploring and defining Irish tradition and character. A comparison with The Informer is also illuminating: the informer in Ford's film is primitive and worthy of pity: the informer in The Molly Maguires is a conscious human being and deserves our contempt.

Just as the subject matter is peculiarly American (the lives of immigrants in the New World) so is the film's style. It has slick effective dialogue, clever camerawork, and all the authentic detail which $8,000,000 can buy. Also effective are the contrasts brought out in the cross-cutting between the pub and the church, and between the slum mines and the sunny green fields. But the effective in American film making is not without its drawbacks and so recalls the words of Lawrence Durrell's Pursewarden: "The effective in art is what rapes the emotion of your audience without nourishing its values." The trouble with most American "realism" in the cinema is that it is usually achieved by authenticity and powerful, clever devices rather than by suggestion.

THE MOLLY MAGUIRES has all the technical magnificence of the biggest Hollywood productions. Some 200 tons of anthracite coal were shipped from Mahoney, Pennsylvania to the studio in Hollywood for a coal wall. Paramount Studios built the longest interior setting ever constructed on a Hollywood sound stage to simulate the interior of the coal mine. With a passion for realistic detail Ritt shot the film in a coal town in Eckley, Pennsylvania. All the homes in the town were repainted slate gray, the color of coal dust, giving a sense of the misery of the time.

In this respect, The Molly Maguires is more successful than Bo Widerburg's Adalen 31. Both films go into the lives of workers and use their private dramas as a vehicle for describing the political situation. But Widerburg's sets and shooting are too beautiful to convince the viewer of the miserable conditions of the workers. He makes it easy to get caught up in the aesthestic brilliance of his film at the expense of the drama. Martin Ritt was so anxious to portray the dismal realities of the coal town that he originally shot in black and white, taking obvious risks at the box office. The film finally became so expensive that Paramount insisted that he shoot in color.

The acting of all the major characters is very fine. Sean Connery plays Jack Kehoe, the restrained, calculating, tormented leader of the Mollies and Samantha Egger portrays Mary, who rejects McParlan's love on finding out he is a detective. His relationship with her seems at best secondary and is probably unnecessary to the film.

McParlan's inner predicament at the end of the film is the price paid by the Establishment for the continuation of his exploitation and suppression of the Irish laborers. The fact that they are able to concentrate their accumulated guilt on a single individual is witness to the spiritually and morally destructive nature of their motives. The elimination of the Maguires required a treachery born of a craving for money and power, the guilt steeped motives of twentieth-century capitalism. The "relevance" of this film has been denounced as an effort towards topicality- but the original script was in fact written over twenty-five years ago.