The Molly Maguires had been Harris’s next after Camelot, but it did not reach the screen until long after it had been completed. The director, Martin Ritt, had been blacklisted during the infamous McCarthy era and the political foundation of the story and the theme of injustice captured in the script of his long-time friend Walter Bernstein appealed to Harris, as well as the fact that his co-star was to be Sean Connery, who was anxious to throw off the yoke of the Bond series and was still the industry’s most bankable actor.
Nevertheless, the Scot had been cast in the second lead after Harris, a credit that should have been unthinkable at the time. Yet with a wry smile Connery, in reply to a journalist’s question on the matter, said: ‘They are paying me a million dollars for this picture. For that money they can put a mule ahead of me.’
Samantha Eggar had been cast in the female lead role. While she had been pushed into the spotlight by her excellent performance in The Collector, five years previously, nothing much had happened for her in the interim.
Set in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the coalfields of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the story follows the true life exploits of a secret organisation of immigrant coal workers, the Molly Maguires, who were dynamiting the trainloads of coal coming out of the mines as a protest against the appalling working conditions and poor pay. Irish-American miners were at the forefront of the terrorist campaign, and the group was named after an Irish widow who had led a band of land agitators in the 1840s.
The pit owners contacted the famous (or even infamous) Pinkerton Detective Agency who, as well as the usual private-eye activities, had developed an expertise as strike breakers and had been engaged by big business all over the country when there were labour disputes. The agents specialised in undercover work and acting as agents provocateurs.
Harris was cast as Jack McParlan, based on a real-life detective, whose job is to infiltrate the group. His job is made harder by the fact that he comes to admire the miners’ leader Jack Kehoe, the role played by Connery. Both characters are Irish immigrants who share the same aspiration of advancement in a new society but come at it from different routes. A natural alliance between them is made impossible by the divergence of their respective interests. The detective’s testimony leads, however, to the conviction and execution of ten members of the secret organisation.
Ritt was looking for an authentic backdrop to the story, so the location of the action was where much of the true events had taken place. This was Eckley, Pennsylvania, a town so unchanged from its appearance in the 1870s that little dressing had to be done. It had been condemned and was due for demolition but the movie saved it and it was transformed into a museum of a mining town of the time.
In production through spring 1968 the location was hot, uncomfortable and dusty and Connery was treated for dehydration at one stage. He and Harris got on very well. The Irish actor was revelling in the role and was at the height of his physical and creative power. Eggar, somewhat left out from this male bonding, at first seemed fragile and aloof, but as she watched them help each other out and share mutual advice she relaxed. As Harris recalled later in an interview: ‘I think Sam was amazed to see two actors of our calibre helping each other, not trying to upstage each other. Once we got to know her, she was the darling of the crew. They adored her.’
Despite poor conditions, it was a happy shoot and Harris and Connery insisted on doing their own physical work without the intervention of stuntmen. One scene was a football match that was a mixture of soccer and rugby. Harris had brought along his New York boozing buddy Malachy McCourt to play a small part and he was appointed referee. Harris clearly thought it was a replay of This Sporting Life, while Connery felt that he still possessed the physical attributes of his Bond days. But this was not the case. Harris sustained a black eye, battered nose and sore ribs while Connery twisted his knee and bruised his shoulder.
Eggar was beguiled by the Irish actor’s crazy energy and enthusiasm: ‘Mad as Richard was, he poured out so much energy that you simply had to try to match up to him.’
After the film wrapped and the post-production process was complete, Paramount was uncertain about the film’s content and marketability and the $11 million investment. It was not released for over a year and then for one reason and another it flopped. The critical responses were mixed, yet by all accounts the film should have succeeded, given the mix and the standard of talent involved in its making.
The highly regarded critic Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker, came closest to identifying the problem:
The Molly Maguires is a failure, nailed on its own aspirations to the tragic and the epic, yet it’s an impressive failure … in the end it is too sombre and portentous for the rather dubious story it carries, but it feels like a reminder of a bitter, tragic past and when you come away you know you have seen something.
Harris got more than faint praise from Kael:
Richard Harris whose devious, hangdog expression makes him a natural for the role, is wily and complex as a smart but weak man. He has a volatile edginess that draws us into the spy’s divided spirit and contributes most of the suspense in the film.
While he was making the film Harris felt it was one of the best he had made and observers on the set felt the same. But what happens in the making, and what survives the cutting-room floor in the film business, particularly with a nervous studio, can be entirely different. Harris would reflect on the experience - not the making of the film but watching the final product - as heartbreaking.
He recalled that the director, Ritt, took the story and related it to those people who had betrayed their own kind during the witch-hunt of the McCarthy era. Ritt was also attempting something more subtle: exposing the treachery on which America exists and the men who climb any kind of ladder to reach the top. Harris comments: ‘When I saw Ritt’s first version of the movie, it was shattering and brutal, but because of whatever pressures one must assume were placed on Ritt during the editing, the film was watered down. The film became a great compromise on the screen.’
It was an aspect of large-budget Hollywood film-making that Harris would remain highly critical of, prompting him some years later to return to the sort of small-budget independent films that launched his career: ‘In big-budget pictures that cost $15 million everybody tells everyone what to do because it costs so much, and it makes me want to get involved in films like This Sporting Life, small, intimate and with substance.’
This he would do, while equally conscious that a jobbing actor would never really be able to afford to turn down the sort of income that only Hollywood can afford. It would be a pattern that he would maintain without completely abandoning his integrity. But he would prove capable of turning down the main chance when he became passionately involved in a vehicle that he believed in.
One thing that characterised Richard Harris was his commitment - whether big or small picture, he gave it his all, even in a celluloid vehicle that, given the many vagaries of the business, had no chance of success. One of these was his only directorial credit - Bloomfield.