THE CRUCIBLE (1996)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Nicholas Hytner

SCREENWRITER: Arthur Miller

FILM STARS: Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Paul Scofield, Joan Allen, Bruce Davison, Rob Campbell, Jeffrey Jones

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Arthur Miller

TYPE: Play

PUBLISHER: Methuen

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1996

COUNTRY: Great Britain

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1953

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: Historical Drama

WORDS:  Arthur Miller’s great play about witch-hunting becomes a solid film.

I could end it there. I should. Everyone who has navigated to this blog I assume would know what “The Crucible” is about, or everyone should know what it’s about.

Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists.

A small group of teen girls in 1692 Salem, Massachusetts caught in an innocent conjuring of love potions to catch young men are forced to tell lies that Satan had invaded them and forced them to participate in the rites and are then forced to name those involved. The community is engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumours that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town’s most basic fears. People are accused, rounded up and put on trial in a frenzy of socially sanctioned violence. Thrown into the mix are greedy preachers and other major landowners trying to steal others’ land and one young woman infatuated with a married man and determined to get rid of his innocent wife. Arthur Miller wrote the events and the subsequent trials where those who demanded their innocence were executed, those who would not name names were incarcerated and tortured, and those who admitted their guilt were immediately freed as a parable of the Congressional Communist witch hunts led by Senator Joe McCarthy in 1950’s America.

In 1953, the year the play debuted, Miller wrote, “The Crucible is taken from history. No character is in the play who did not take a similar role in Salem, 1692.” This does not appear to be accurate as Miller made both deliberate changes and incidental mistakes. Abigail Williams’ age was increased from 11 or 12 to 17, probably to add credence to the backstory of Proctor’s affair with Abigail. John Proctor himself was 60 years old in 1692, but portrayed as much younger in the play, for the same reason”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible

Of course, there was one problem, and one Miller recognized (at least later if not at the time) …. “Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious—that there never were any witches but there certainly are Communists”.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/21/why-i-wrote-the-crucible

He gets around this by suggesting that people at the time believed there were witches so for all intents and purposes the situations are analogous.

He goes on to say, “The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler’s Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbours being trucked off, or farmers in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks vanishing before their eyes, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned. As I learned from non-Jewish refugees, however, there was often a despairing pity mixed with “Well, they must have done something.” Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable And so the evidence has to be internally denied”.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/21/why-i-wrote-the-crucible

It has become the ultimate literary epitome of the wrongness of groupthink, up there with 1984 by Orwell, and is respected and highly regarded.

Having said all that the Miller play has been called misogynist, which I’m certain was not on his radar in 1he early 1950s. Feminists suggest that Abigail (the accuser) and the other female characters are crazy and antagonizing. Yes, Abigail’s actions posed major problems – but Miller portrays John Proctor, the man who has illicit sex with her, as a martyr. Miller grants the men in this play complexity and autonomy; he relegates women to the role of one-dimensional witches. John Proctor can call Abigail Williams a whore all the live-long day, but she’s not the one who is cheating on anyone. I can see that but for the story wasn’t meant to be about male female relationships or Tennessee Williams like shenanigans, was it?. They also always point out she’s also half his age (not that would have been unusual in that day and age) .

Arthur Miller adapted his own play into the screenplay for the 1996 film, making some intentional cuts and additions for the cinematic medium. Miller restored some material, including the second scene from Act Two between John and Abigail in the woods, which had been cut from the play’s final draft. He pays attention to detail but, for all that, Miller was still a little loose with history. The real Abigail Williams was eleven years old during the time of the trials and John Proctor was 60 years old. I’m not sure why Miller felt the need to age up an twelve year old girl and insert a fictional affair as the reason for the start of the Salem witch trials. Sex sells?

He tries to make a more sympathetic Proctor (as does the film) by having more graphic violence done to him but a man who blames his wife for giving him the side eye after he cheated on her and, in the same breath, blames the teen girl he had an affair with for believing he felt something for her isn’t riding the moral high ground. There are also some bits and pieces like where Abigail visits John Proctor in prison, a new development, not present in the play, where she was previously shown to simply flee Salem.

The film is solid but never terrifying as it would have been for those accused or for the town in general. It is convincing but slightly manipulative. The witchcraft is accepted but the environment that creates a world where witchcraft is accepted isn’t really explored. And, ultimately maybe it is just because the issue wasn’t relevant anymore the whole naming names (or pointing fingers) isn’t a big societal influenced failing but rather just a personal failing. Often people wish that a book made into a film in the 40s or 50s was made today so they could get around the censorship of the times but with The Crucible I regret that it wasn’t made in Hollywood in the 1950s as I think some of the subsequent history and distance from the events  of the 1950s has diluted the message. But I specify Hollywood … Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Marxist phase, wrote a screenplay of the play for a French version in 1957 that blamed the tragedy on the rich landowners conspiring to persecute the poor which had little to do with the play. (In truth, most of those who were hanged in Salem were people of substance, and two or three were very large landowners). So, perhaps a version with Kirk Douglas, or Burt Lancaster or maybe both … though their similar period piece film of George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple (1959) did them no favours). Arthur Kennedy played Proctor in the 1953 Broadway version and he would have been good for the film even if lacked star power.

Here, everyone does their bit. Daniel Day-Lewis does what he does best which is immerse himself in the role. Apparently, he built the house he lived in as John Proctor, because of his habit of maintaining his character through the entire duration of the filming. To quote and re-apply Laurence Olivier “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”. Though in truth you can always see Lewis “acting”. Winona Ryder, Paul Scofield, Joan Allen, Bruce Davison are all good. Director Nicholas Hytner is a prolific English theatre director who had a hit with his first film The Madness of King George (1994). The Crucible was his second, and he has dabbled in films since without great success but has maintained a busy career directing A grade theatre and opera in Britain. He utilizes the wider wilderness surrounding Salem, creating a more immersive and visually dramatic experience than the play’s predominantly indoor scenes, but it all feels a little stagey like a planned community (maybe it was) rather than a living and breathing village.

The film is certainly relevant to the here and now and perhaps it should be remade again (and updated … are you allowed to update it to the 21st century?) it seems odd that this hasn’t been updated.

Period films without epic battles are always a hard sell …. as proven here. On a budget of $25 million the film only made $7.3 million.

The play has been staged and revived (but still as a period piece) and it has been held on high by the left (probably because Miller was a leftist for some time). You can have a twit theatre critic at The Guardian (why anyone well-read reads the Guardian I don’t know) calling it magnificent because “Miller’s account of the witch-hunts in Salem in 1692 was initially seen as a political parable about Senator McCarthy’s investigation of suspected communists in the America of the early 1950s. Given the fact that in President Trump’s America, freedom of assembly, of the press and of speech are no longer guaranteed, and that you can be threatened with deportation for taking part in a pro-Palestinian protest, it is no surprise that people turn to The Crucible”.

who goes on to double down and show his undergarments …

“My admiration for Miller’s play and my belief in its capacity to take on new meanings are, I hope, clear. But it is precisely because it is being revived at a time when President Trump is suppressing dissent and creating global chaos that I would raise another question: should we, as a form of intellectual protest, gradually wean ourselves off our dependence on American drama? I avoid the word “boycott” because I suspect it is both impractical and undesirable but I recall that I did once ask Harold Pinter, because of his disgust with US foreign policy, which he once equated with that of Nazi Germany, whether he had ever thought of withdrawing his plays from American performance. There was – naturally – a long pause, before Pinter replied that he hoped the production of his plays would give support to groups as opposed as himself to the destructive lies of American politicians“. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/may/06/abuse-witch-hunts-hangings-arthur-millers-the-crucible

Maybe Miller would be happy but The Crucible fits in equally nicely (perhaps better) as a statement on anyone being “called out” or “cancelled” or “outed” or forced to take sides and face criticism if they don’t or don’t forcefully enough. Does this Guardian critic own a mirror?

Ultimately people on the left look at the play and rely on the legal power the oppressors wield, whereas people on the right use the play to criticize the moral power the left wields.

The play has sex, courtroom drama, and people being nasty to each other and on that level it is a good read but not a great one for me because it’s liberal with the historical facts, to meet a dramatic narrative and a theme (political position) that is moveable. Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” is better.

The film is a solid watch but it is Peyton Place in period clothes. And, I have no problems with that.

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