Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

GazerRise Fantastic!

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

chaos-rampant This is one of the great immigrant movies; it speaks in a manner simple and concise about what it means to be the outsider, to be used and abused and your voice never heard, to be at the bottom of the barrel looking up. It speaks about despair violence and moral devastation in the Pennsylvania coal mines of 1876, about right and wrong, law and ethos, and their flipsides, violence and anarchy. The movie's characters have amazingly human needs, some of them to be heard in that shanty town of Pennsylvania and others to get away from it. Richard Harris plays one of the most fascinating complex characters I've seen. I love his type of character so much because he's the villain, the one we must boo, but he doesn't give a damn about our booing, he doesn't look for absolution or forgiveness in the end. I like characters who have what it takes to be the bad guy.He's paid to infiltrate a radical group of coalworkers, The Molly Maguires, find out who they are and give them up. For a time he sympathizes with their cause, he goes down to the coal mines and comes out with the same paste of coaldust grime and sweat on his face and gets paid 24 cents a week for it, but when he needs to name names he does so without flinching. Like the Irish coal miners he mingles with, he's a man "at the bottom of the barrel", but unlike them, he wants to be at the top of the barrel looking down. He finds love, his boarding lady who's desperate to get out of that coaldusted hellhole, a woman of strict ethics who wants decency and lawfulness. He tells her that "you buy decency and respectability like you buy a loaf of bread", so that he recognizes the futility of the Mollies' struggle and can't help to be drawn to it, to that fleeting sparkle of futile human defiance against injustice. But that's not the movie's meridian, although it feels so at the time. A little later we get a magnificent discussion in a tavern, during a wake, between himself and Sean Connery, brooding leader of the Mollies', where Richard Harris tells him that he'll never die, that he's going to live forever.It struck me like a brick, like reading Judge Holden speak to his scalphunter comrades in Blood Meridian around a campfire in the middle of the desert, because essentially and metaphorically, that is true; everybody else will pass away, the men who struggle and fight oppression and the men who die "without making a pip", but Richard Harris will live forever. He's deceit everlasting, the cosmic trickster. During their trial, when the prosecutor against the Mollies' calls for the first witness, a door to an adjacent room opens and we see Richard Harris calmly playing cards with the police captain, a man he has nothing but contempt for. In the end, there's neither punishment nor forgiveness for him, he's beyond all that, a little above and beyond everything else, damnation and vengeance, beyond even love or self-pity, human compassion and regret too. In the end he walks by a newly erected scaffold being tested by prison wardens, and he simply walks away never looking back. He's not even going away to Denver, Colorado, to be in charge of a detective agency there, he goes beyond that, [...] he never sleeps, he says that he will never die, he dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favourite, he never sleeps, he says that he will never die. Perfect.What's not perfect is the bogus score by Henry Mancini, basically upbeat irish folk reworkings. Maybe 16 Horsepower should redo this one.

DEBSR28 I love the movie. I think it's partly because some of my relatives including my father worked in the coal mines. And also part of the movie was filmed near where I grew up. It is really historical. I also liked all of the actors in the movie.When I was a boy. I remember seeing the choppers carrying the crew to other locations in the area to film other scenes. It was really neat. My wife knows some people that played extra parts in the film. Actually it was filmed at Eckley Miners Village. Near Hazleton Pennsylvania. It has become a museum that is open to the public. When they did the filming for the movie. The had to renovate some of the buildings. Eckley is an actual mining town from the 1800's.

mikedonovan Apparently the Molly Maguires were four guys infiltrated by Richard Harris. I once read that they were a large organization of terrorist miners all over eastern Pennsylvania in 1876-77.I don't know why Don Knotts was in thi8s film without a credit at the end. He played a Pinkerton detective and was surprisingly convincing for someone who usually plays a funnyman.They took a lot of liberties with the story but what else is new? The priest stole the movie with his sanctimonious lectures to the Maguires at every funeral. Why did they take chowderhead off the IMDb? He was my hero.Henry Mancini did the music and there's nothing like good music to dance to when people are dying in coal mining accidents. The Molly Maguires was an amazing mood piece for life in the coal mines in the 19th century but it did not do justice to the injustices that motivated the Molly Maguires to acts of protest. The Mollys were wrong but they were wronged to begin with and the movie does not show the grievances of the workers in any mature way.I liked the part when they tried to kill Harris with a pile of coal.

mcgooosh This movie is near and dear to me having grown up in Northeastern Pennslyvania and having forefathers who worked in the mines. This is a great movie depicting the realities of the working class and to have an ending that is typical of the lives of those Irish Americans in NEPA. "Don't look for happy endings Tom, it's not and American story, it's an Irish one." (Brad Pitt, Devil's Own) One question I would like to know the answer to, is when McKenna and Miss Mary Raines go to "the city", what city is being referred to? I grew up in Scranton, PA and for the time period it was the largest city in the area. Philadelphia seems to far away, but maybe they were referring to Harrisburg.