Date: 1970
Director: Martin
Ritt
Summary: Life is
hard in the anthracite coal region of 19th-century Pennsylvania, especially for
the Irish workers who seem trapped in a hopeless cycle of poverty and dangerous
work. But one group of men – a secret
society of Irish Catholics known as the Molly Maguires – has decided to fight
back. Using covert acts of sabotage and
assassination, the Mollies terrorize the coal operators and the police who they
feel have wronged them for so long. But
now there is an informer among their ranks, and he may prove more dangerous to
the Mollies than any coal operator has ever been.
Review: The
Molly Maguires is an interesting movie, from a Catholic perspective, for at
least two reasons. First, it tells a
part of our collective history. And
second, it introduces the theme of social justice while showing what can happen
in its absence.
Though the story of the Molly Maguires has been part legend
from the start and continues to be shrouded in mystery, there is truth in that
story that is worth being told. In the
second half of the 19th century, many Irish Americans lived and
worked in coal patch towns. Poverty and
violence were a constant reality and, in the decades following the Civil War,
Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region found itself in the national spotlight
when a series of assassinations and other violent acts against coal authorities
were attributed to a secret society of Catholic Irishmen. Detectives got involved, and in the end
several men hanged for it.
The movie, necessarily, states as fact some things that
might not be true. It names the Mollies
and their motives while fully analyzing the perspective of the man – an Irish
Catholic himself – who agreed to find the Mollies and set them up for arrest
and execution. Though the writer and
director had to take some creative license with history, they reach to the core
of some very real themes that are as relevant today as they were in the 1870s. Viewers are led to sympathize with the grievances
of the Mollies, but they cannot endorse murder as an appropriate response. They struggle with one character’s comment
that this fight is like a war, and have to wonder if the rules of war could
apply to this situation, with some “soldiers” drawn reluctantly into battle by
the simple nature of their job title or ethnicity. They have to look at the character of
McParlan – the informer – and decide if he is more or less guilty than the
Mollies. Is he justified to turn in the
assassins? What if he admits that he does
it not in the name of justice, but because it is his chosen way to find a
better position in society? Is anyone in
the story wholly innocent? Is anyone
entirely guilty? If there is a blameless
course of action, what can it be?
Though some historians find fault with the factual accuracy
of the movie, it powerfully draws attention to the most relevant questions
brought up by the Molly Maguire events.
The movie tells a good story, and it does it well. Furthermore, its cast includes Richard Harris
and Sean Connery, so Dumbledore and James Bond unite to share with us this
important piece of American Catholic history.
