Another of the movies that was just about to expire from my DVR that I was glad to see show up on TCM was The Molly Maguires. I think I'd come across it on one of the FAST channels that's part of Pluto's set of channels, the movie having been made at Paramount and Pluto being owned by Paramount. I'd wanted to watch it so when it wound up on the TCM schedule I made a point to put it on the DVR.
It's Pennsylvania in 1876, in one of those coal-mining towns that nobody ever really gets out of, or didn't in those days, although it's the sort of town that immigrants came to because the work was less bad than what they faced in their home countries. In this case, the immigrants are Irish, and we see before the opening credits just how hard the mining work is. They have to set charges to open up new tunnels to dig out more coal, although in this case they're actually setting the charges to blow up the mine as a part of protest as to how brutal their conditions are.
Into all of this comes James MacParlan (Richard Harris). Nobody knows him, and he walks into a bar talking to the miners asking about how to get a job. They don't trust him, and for good reason, when they see his hands and realize he's the sort of person who hasn't done a day of manual labor in his life, because look at his hands. He gets in a bar fight, observed by Black Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery), and gets arrested for it. The arrest is a ruse, however, as we learn MacParlan's real reason for being here. MacParlan is working for the Pinkerton detective agency, and they want to learn who's responsible for the sabotage. They've heard of an organization called the Ancient Order of Hibernians and their support for the Molly Maguires who they think are behind the sabotage. MacParlan's job is to get work at the coal mine and figure out who's leading the Molly Maguires to commit all this sabotage.
Now, any number of the miners are suspicious of him, to the point that he finds it hard to get a place to stay, under the fake name McKenna. Eventually, a poor spinster living with her father, Mary Raines (Samantha Eggar), takes him in. As you might guess, the two begin to fall in love, although things are going to be difficult because of his job being to take down the Molly Maguires and not being able to be honest about why he's in town.
Still, Kehoe and the other miners suspect him, even after he claims he fled here after murdering a man (a lie, of course, but he has to have some back story). Still, there's the old line about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, so they bring him into the fold if only to be able to catch him out at working for the bosses. There's also the sabotage from the miners, as well as the revenge from those members of the police who are violent enough that simply taking the guilty and imprisoning them isn't enough. Will MacParlan be able to catch out the Molly Maguires before they discover he's a spy?
The Molly Maguires is the sort of movie that I don't think would have been able to be made under the Production Code, or at least would have had to be severely sanitized. A movie like Black Fury comes to mind: well-made, but a bit tame and studio-bound. The Molly McGuires has the benefit of location shooting, along with excellent performances from Connery and Harris.
I'm very glad I got around to watching The Molly Maguires, and am not sure why it isn't as well known at it should be considering the presence of Connery and Harris.
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