The Crucible wasn't a play Arthur Miller expected to be filmed by a Hollywood Studio. First performed in 1953, at the height of the anti-communist hysteria, it was precisely the kind of project to send righteous-minded, patriotic studio bosses into a lather of indignation.
However, some 40 years on, with McCarthyism an unpleasant memory and Miller's play up there with the modern American classics, 20th Century Fox didn't balk at investing US$25 million in bringing it to the screen.
The days of Commie-bashing may be gone, but both Miller and director Nicholas Hytner believe the play has a strong contemporary resonance. 'It speaks directly about the bigotry of religious fundamentalists across the globe, about communities torn apart by child abuse, about the rigid intellectual orthodoxies of college campuses.'
Hytner has admitted to a certain embarrassment at asking Miller to tinker with the original. ('I felt as if I was asking Shakespeare for amendments to King Lear.') Nevertheless, this is a relatively faithful adaptation of Miller's allegorical tale of witch hunts in 17th-century Salem. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, the former as upright farmer John Proctor and the latter as Abigail Williams, the adolescent girl with whom he has a fateful affair.
The Crucible's producer Robert Miller (Arthur's son) protests that 'the story is really about sex', but this is costume drama with a distinctly puritan slant. Location work was done on Hog Island, Massachusetts, a beautiful but insect-infested nature reserve with neither electricity nor telephone lines. Hytner and Miller wanted the movie to have a roughness, a sense of historical authenticity, and, above all, to make it cinematic. They hope you won't even notice that it was once a play. Geoffrey Macnab
Regie (Dir): Nicholas Hytner Buch
(Scr): Arthur Miller Darsteller
(Cast): Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Paul Scofield, Joan Allen, Bruce Davison.
Länge (Running time): 122 Minuten
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