How a 1970 Sean Connery movie saved a Pennsylvania mining town from demolition
The late, great Sean Connery was responsible for a lot of things. For one, you can lay the blame for several generations of people trying to do impressions simply by using ‘sh’ instead of an ‘s’ in words ( ‘impresshions’) at his door.
Connery also raised the bar for men unreasonably, what with being a bodybuilder, a navy sailor, a movie star, a bricklayer, handsome, and being six foot two. But did he additionally manage to save an entire town from being blown up? Well, kind of yes.
The few remaining residents of a North American village named Eckley in Pennsylvania certainly owe him a debt of gratitude, or at least they should send a belated note of thanks to the producers of a historical drama from 1970 called The Molly Maguires starring the legendary Scot.
That’s because at the end of the 1960s, Paramount Pictures was scouting for locations in order to film the story of the Maguires, a gang of miners who banded together in the late 19th century to fight against exploitation from the companies that ran the coal mines. They settled on Eckley, one of dozens of ‘patch towns’ that the organisations had built in the 1850s, so that not only would they get the miners’ labour, they would also benefit from the rent and wages spent in the company-run general store.
Eckley was particularly well-preserved, meaning it would serve as an authentic backdrop for the film, in which Connery would play ‘Black Jack’ Kehoe, the leader of the Molly Maguires, opposite fellow British film luminary Richard Harris as the detective sent to infiltrate the secret society’s activities. The Irish-immigrant Maguires were often accused of using sabotage and violence in order to have their demands met, and once the detective had finished his job, 20 men were tried and hanged.
But before the film studio picked the town, it had been earmarked for demolition, much like the others scattered around Carbon County, having been sold off after World War II when coal mining production dropped away. The film’s budget meant many of the buildings were refurbished, and today the town operates as a functional historical museum, with around two dozen people living on the site. Many of the sets and props used in the 1970 film are still displayed today, and the courtroom used in a pivotal scene still hosted trials as late as 1996.
The film itself, however, was undeniably a huge flop.
Considering Connery was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet at the time, having just finished playing James Bond, his name alone should have been enough to secure success, but that didn’t prove to be the case. Made on a large budget of around $11million, it pulled in just $2m at the box office, despite a score by Henry Mancini and an eventual Oscar nomination for ‘Best Art Direction’.
It didn’t do any harm to Connery’s standing, however, he was in the midst of making some of the best and most underrated movies of his career at that point, filming Sidney Lumet’s excellent heist movie The Anderson Tapes the following year, and changing his mind in going back to Bond in 1971 with Diamonds Are Forever.
