Anyone who has seen the recent documentary “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders of Robin Hood Hills” will recognize in its portrait of a small Arkansas town many parallels with this fable about Salem, including those who mask their own doubts in preemptive charges of Satanic conspiracies.
Perhaps every age gets the “Crucible” it deserves. Today, ironically, we have come full circle we are no longer paranoid about communists, but we are once again paranoid about Satan-worship. When the play was first produced, it was easily decoded as an allegory about the anti-communist frenzy of the McCarthy period. During the course of the action there will be an outbreak of accusations of witchcraft-all of them false, most of them inspired either by sexual revenge or misguided holy ecstasy. Miller's play is about religious hysteria fanned by repressed and denied sexual lust.
In all the troubled history of Salem, was there ever an event like this? How did the young girls, so carefully protected, slip from their homes? How did they come to be so uninhibited, in a Puritan society, that they could dance naked together? In a movie that will be about false accusations of witchcraft, this is an ominous beginning if it looks like witchcraft, sounds like witchcraft and smells like witchcraft, then can it possibly be an innocent frolic of high-spirited young teenagers? This scene was offstage, wisely, in the original 1952 stage production of Arthur Miller's “The Crucible.” To show it in this new film version is a mistake, because the play is not about literal misbehavior but about imagined transgressions what one imagines a witch does is infinitely more stimulating and troubling than this child's play. By the light of a full moon, a minister happens upon a group of adolescent girls, naked, dancing in the forest around a boiling pot of witches' brew. The first scene in “The Crucible” strikes the first wrong note.
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