A Tale of Moral Complexity

The dirty workday draws to a close. Down the dank pit of an anthracite-coal shaft, weary miners pack their tools and straggle into empty coal carts to be hauled up to the surface and into the grimy dusk. But a few remain behind. Sticks of dynamite are pulled from a lunch pail, coat pockets and caches in the mine. Hands work nervously at wiring the dynamite sticks into a bomb, concealing it under a crucial buttress, lighting the fuse. Beneath the coal dust, the men's faces are businesslike, dispassionate. They walk together, away from their work, and the grim countryside is quiet for a long moment; then a blast practically tears the earth apart, precipitating a shower of debris that fills the air like some poisonous black snowfall.

This opening sequence from an intelligent and powerful new film called The Molly Maguires pretty well states both its great strength and regrettable weakness. The film, like the scene, is full of gritty, sinuous power, the kind of coarse moralism at which Director Martin Ritt excels. But it is also a little too lingering, a little too clinical to be entirely satisfactory. Ritt misses the extra measure of adrenaline that would have produced not only an intellectual experience but a chilling emotional response.

Classless Division. The Molly Maguires were a secret organization of Irishmen formed in Pennsylvania in the mid-1800s to combat the inhumanity of the mineowners. The film concentrates on the destruction of the Mollys through the intervention of an Irish immigrant named McParlan (Richard Harris). As a private detective, he infiltrates the group, befriends its leader, Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery), and finally, remorselessly, turns three of them in to hang. Scenarist Walter Bernstein was plainly most interested in the moral complexities of his two protagonists. McParlan and Kehoe are countrymen and of the same class; yet the "classless" society of America has irrevocably divided them. They both want the same things; as McParlan says, "I'm tired of always looking up. I want to look down." But if McParlan is a traitor, Kehoe, according to the tenets of his Roman Catholicism, is a murderer doomed to damnation. "There's no punishment this side o' hell can free you from what you did," Kehoe tells McParlan from his death cell. McParlan replies coldly, "See you in hell."

Ritt can be faulted for lack of dramatic emphasis, but his work with actors is immaculate. Harris, in an intricate role, gives his best performance since This Sporting Life, and Connery proves that after years of James Bondage he is one of the screen's most underrated stars, an actor of tightly controlled power and technical accomplishment. But perhaps the greatest pleasure of The Molly Maguires is literary. Walter Bernstein's screenplay is a perfect model of the craft, some of the best movie writing in recent years. He has created two complex and difficult characters who emerge, in all their shadings, as two decidedly real people--or approximately 1 1/2 more real people than most other movies can offer.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.