mark.waltz
One of the classic theatrical dramas is from a modern playwright whose Broadway credits are the types of stories that creates legendary theatrical experiences. I've seen two stage versions of this brilliant play (only just over 60 years old) and every ounce deserving of classic status.This is a story of the lusts that tear young women apart, so in love that they turn to the dark arts to get the man they want. Rumors of witchcraft spreads through the small village (where a ton of locales seem to congregate), and events which they do not understand they blame on the powers of the darkness and set out to destroy anyone and everyone who may have helped raise the level of evil. From gossip comes paranoia. From that comes injustice, and from that comes unjust executions while the young girls, as lead by the determined Winona Ryder, desperately try to keep each of the names clean, even at the expense of somebody else's life.The seemingly quiet but vindictive Ryder has intense feelings for farmer Daniel Day Lewis, secretly flattered but determined to remain faithful to his wife (Joan Allen). Easy to blame is African servant girl Charlaine Woodard (treated with disrespect even though she's presumably a paid servant, not a slave. The tension explodes thanks to the malicious flapping of the tongue, even striking down Rebecca Nurse (Elizabeth Lawrence) whose reputation for compassion and good deeds is known way past the town. By the time this occurs, the girls are all twittering like attacking birds.With a modern retelling but every inch in the era of the real Salem witch trials (1692), it is a reminder that early colonial America suffered from many of the same hypocrisies that caused the Europeans to flea to a new world in the first place. This is outstanding in practically every detail, an issue that still rings true today.
Roedy Green
This is like a science fiction movie, where everyone is moved by motives that make no sense. The actors speak in stilted period English but it is not that hard to understand.There is no defence against a charge of witchcraft. If you had an alibi you were nowhere near, that does not count, since your spirit could have done it. If the victim were surrounded by people, who saw nothing, then you did it by making yourself invisible. The victim just announces who did the witchcraft, even when they have no reason to suspect any particular culprit. The victims are never asked how they know X did it. They are never asked to show physical injury.You just accuse someone. That is all that is required to presume their guilt. The motives for accusing are petty jealousies, petty revenge, sadism, mischief, playfulness... With just a little acting and drama, you can kill off anyone you please. One horrible schemer of a girl accuses a married man's wife, and caps the deal by planting some evidence, hoping she can have her husband for herself.The young girls at Salem were far from innocent. They were vicious little bitches. They were calculating murderers. They did it primarily for fun. They seemed to get sexual pleasure from watching the hangings.Refusal to confess association with the devil is proof of guilt and leads to hanging. By "confessing" and implicating others you can get off with a punishment less than death. The villagers are torn between creating false confessions and sticking to the truth. Before calm returns, they have hanged 19 people, a substantial proportion of the village.Modern day Creationists remind me of this mad logic when they refuse any evidence to counter the validity of the bible or the validity of evolution.The characters all harbour insane ideas about the bible, witches and Christianity. The books about witchcraft, which are just fiction, are treated as the ultimate authority. Ditto for the bible. The villagers are nearly all evil, vicious, vindictive, suspicious, hateful bastards. It is hard to pay attention to anything else going on in the movie (a reconstruction of Salem village life) but those crazy spiteful beliefs.The court is no better, seeing the devil behind every tree, deciding ahead of time that everyone even indirectly mentioned is guilty.It is amazing we managed to grow out of this way of thinking.Paul Scofield as Judge Thomas Danforth plays a wonderful villain. He so authoritative in his own universe, but completely mad relative to ours. He is so utterly sure of his rightness.Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams also plays a great villain. She starts out innocently enough, as the jilted lover, but she is willing to kill off all her acquaintances in her mad scheme to get him back. She is infinitely self-centred, a real psychopath.The whole madness is so stressful, it makes saints of some people and petty monsters of others. It is interesting watching them change.
James Hitchcock
The Salem witch trials of 1692 have always gripped the American imagination, possibly precisely because they are something so un-American. America prides itself on being the "New World", modern, democratic and rational, yet the witch trials, and the superstitious, intolerant and authoritarian attitudes which produced them, seem very much of the Old World. Indeed, in some respects Americans of this period were more old-fashioned than the Mother Country. The last English witch trials had taken place ten years earlier, and by the 1690s belief in witchcraft was in decline. Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" takes the witch-trials for its subject, but was also written as a critique of McCarthyism. Miller succeeded in his intention to such an extent that it is today difficult for any historian to write about the proceedings of the House Un- American Activities Committee without using the phrase "witch hunt", but whether this has done the play's long-term reputation any good is another matter. McCarthyism may have been a burning issue in the fifties, but today, at least to anyone under the age of eighty, the HUAC seems nearly as remote in time as the witch trials themselves. Moreover, the parallels that Miller draws between Salem and McCarthyism are not, in my opinion, persuasive. And yet I nevertheless regard this as one of the greatest tragedies written in English in the twentieth century. It has taken on a life of its own, independent of the political concerns that prompted it, and become a timeless work which still speaks to us today, not as a satire on a long-dead politician, but as a play about injustice and the struggle against it. Miller's hero, John Proctor, is a classic flawed tragic hero, a man who becomes involved in tragedy because of his human frailties. Proctor, a prosperous farmer, has been unfaithful to his wife Elizabeth with their maidservant, Abigail Williams, but has repented of his adulterous affair and, at his wife's request, dismissed Abigail from his service. These events come back to haunt him. Abigail is the leading figure in a group of girls and young women who begin to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft and who, in the prevailing climate of superstitious Puritanism, are readily believed by the authorities. Abigail, still obsessively in love with Proctor and consumed with hatred for his wife, accuses Elizabeth Proctor, who is arrested. Proctor's attempt to prove his wife's innocence backfires, and he is himself accused and sentenced to death. Told that his life will be spared if he confesses, he faces the dilemma of either saving his life by falsely confessing to a crime, or continuing to maintain his innocence, which means that he will be hanged. A French film, "Les Sorcieres de Salem", was based upon Miller's play in the fifties, but he had to wait another four decades before Hollywood plucked up the courage to follow suit. Miller himself wrote the screenplay, and Proctor is played by his son-in-law Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis is one of the most reliable screen actors in the world today; I have never seen him give a bad performance, and seldom one which is less than compelling. He is also a versatile actor who has created a gallery of memorable characters all quite different from one another, unlike some actors who play essentially the same character in every film they make. Although he is British and Irish by descent, many of his best-known characters, from Hawkeye in "The Last of the Mohicans" to President Lincoln, have been American, and Proctor is another. Day-Lewis makes him both proud and sensuous, but a man of integrity who will fight to retain that integrity, even at the cost of his life, in a world gone mad.The modern play closest in theme to "The Crucible" is, in my view, Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons", also inspired by real historical events and with a hero who would rather forfeit his life than tell a lie. It is therefore appropriate that Paul Scofield, who famously played Thomas More in the stage and screen versions of "A Man for All Seasons", should also star in "The Crucible". Here he also plays a lawyer named Thomas, but a villain rather than the hero. Judge Thomas Danforth, Proctor's nemesis and the man tasked with investigating the allegations of witchcraft, is a cold, precise, bloodless figure, the sort of lawyer who is less concerned to see justice done than to see that if injustice is done it is done according to the strict letter of the law. A third fine performance comes from Winona Ryder as the spiteful, hysterical and vindictive Abigail, reminding us of just what a fine young actress she could be at her best, even if in recent years her emotionally troubled private life has received more attention than her acting. There are also good contributions from Elizabeth Lawrence as Rebecca Nurse, an old woman who maintains her dignity despite the absurd charges that are brought against her, and Rob Campbell as John Hale, a clergyman who initially supports the witch-hunt but who has enough integrity to change his mind to when he realises that the campaign has got out of hand and become an opportunity to settle old scores. The film was directed by Nicholas Hytner, also responsible for another successful historical drama of the mid-nineties, "The Madness of King George". "The Crucible" is not, however, made in the lavish "heritage cinema" style. In keeping with the Puritan aesthetic of the early Salem settlers and with the dark events which constitute its subject-matter, the look of the film is restrained and sombre. Hytner has produced a fitting adaptation of this great play. 8/10
