Since 1958, “The Crucible” has been on a stage almost continuously in some part of the world, and it should have been a natural for the movies. “The story is really about sex,” says Bob Miller, paraphrasing the pitch that got him a dozen we’ll-call-yous before Hytner, the British theater directorwho made the well-received 1994 film “The Madness of King George,” took the project on. “It’s about relationships, it’s about betrayal, it’s about forgiveness. These are all hot topics in Hollywood.” Yet Hollywood discerned that it was also really about Massachusetts Bay Puritans in the 1690s (not hot), and really really about the Red scare of the 1950s, when both Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee were sifting the State Department, the military and Hollywood itself for traces of ideological impurity.
In “The Crucible” the Salem witch trials, with their obsessive fear of conspiracy, their confessions and their rattings-out, play like the army-McCarthy hearings. (In the new film, actor Bruce Davison, playing the local minister, deliberately evokes lawyer Boy Cohn’s whispering into McCarthy’s ear.) To the movie industry, the play was at first too hot to handle: in the ’50s Hollywood blacklisted actors, directors and writers, often on evidence of Salem-quality shakiness. By the time black-listing ended, “The Crucible” had become something filmmakers were even more loath to touch: a classic supposedly bristling with moral and political messages.
Yet Miller built more ambiguity into"The Crucible" than he’s generally given credit for: no character is wholly admirable or contemptible, and its ultimate message maysimply be Watch your back. In his opening-night review, the influential critic Walter Kerr called it a “mechanical parable,” but today it’s possible to shrug off the play’s allegorical elbows and winks. This pure product of the ’50s now seems to allude to all sorts of things that might be on moviegoing minds in the ’90s: from adults accused of ritual child abuse to 6-year-olds accused of sexual harassment, from fundamentalist dread of the Great Satan to fundamentalist dread of the New World Order, from contamination by the AIDS virus to contamination by illegal immigrants to contamination by secondhand smoke. “There’s a kind of floating paranoia in the world,” says Miller. “I think that’s maybe what makes the play seem to be always topical.”
But as much as its broad-brush relevance, what probably helped get “The Cruccible” made is just what Bob Miller said: it really is about sex. The adulterous affair between farmer John Proctor (Day-Lewis) and his young servant Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder) sets in motion the whole story of a scorned mistress trying to kill her lover’s wife with a blood-drinking ritual, then implicating half the town in accusations of witchcraft. In the play, one of Miller’s stage directions says Abigail has “an endless capacity for dissembling.” But she and the gaggle of girls she leads by the nose aren’t simply frauds. What’s really whizzing around the Salem meetinghouse–as any skeptical observer of the occult would recognize–aren’t spectral presences but displaced sexual energies. Forget the cultural deepthink. This is the kind of thing Hollywood knows how to sell.
In The New York Times, The Nation magazine’s publisher Victor Navasky (who wrote a history of the Hollywood blacklist) has claimed “my spies tell me that 20th Century Fox intends to market ‘The Crucible’ as a ‘Fatal Attraction’ story.” Independent producer David Picker, called in by Fox to ride herd on Hytner and the Millers, says this is “palpable nonsense,” but the trailer has two shots of Ryder groping for Day-Lewis’s privates, a flash of the single nude scene and a voice-over intoning, “What they cannot possess they must destroy!” So what did anyone expect? Alistair Cooke in an armchair? Take away the soap opera and “The Crucible” would be Kafka costumed for a Thanksgiving pageant.
After all–to be really crass for a moment–the studio has $25 million in this. It’s chump change by “Independence Day” standards, but far more than such comparably honorable films as “The Remains of the Day” or “Dead Man Walking.” The producers were able to rent old costumes from the 1995 turkey “The Scarlet Letter” (the “Crucible” cast went to see it in Boston while filming last fall and howled with laughter all the way through), but the generous budget came in handy when they had to rebuild 1692 Salem on Hog Island off the Massachusetts coast. The east couldn’t have come cheap, either, though it came gladly. “We went to Daniel immediately,” says Hytner, “because of course you would. Realistically, the reason we were able to spend $25-odd million is because Daniel committed to it. That’s just the nuts and bolts of Hollywood. And essentially we had our choice across the rest of the world.”
Even the choosy Shakespearean actor Paul Scofield signed on quickly to play Danforth, the head witch hunter. “He’s rather famous for saying no, very courteously, within 24 hours.” Most eager of all may have been Winona Ryder. “The waiting period was agonizing,” she says. “I knew Daniel had approval and I knew Daniel, so I knew that probably wouldn’t be a problem, but in my head I was going, ‘What if Arthur Miller goes to the video store anf the only thing they have to rent of mine is some terrible movie and he just says no?’” Ryder was the only major player w ho wasn’t stage-trained, but she needn’t have worried about Miller’s reaction. “I’ve finally found that the right actress can do what I’d envisioned,” he says of Ryder’s sexy-scary performance, “which is to show that Abigail is somebody with an agenda who’s also off her rocker.”
The real-life Abigail was 11 or 12 (not 17), the real-life Proctor in this 60s (not Daniel Day-Lewis); any affair between them was a historical iffy but dramatically visionary inference on Miller’s part. And the real-life proceedings in Salem were even more brutal than the film suggests. The harrowing scene in which heavy stones are laid on a stubborn old man named Giles Corey until he dies under their weight is more harrowing still in an eyewitness account: Corey’s tongue popped out and “the Sher riff with his Cane forced it in again, when he was dying.” Present-day Salem folk acted as extras in the film, and the cast found them both amusing (“I have the original rock that crushed Giles Corey in my driveway,” mimics Bruce Davison) and a tad chill ing. “It’s the most ethnically pure of any place I’ve been to where people speak English,” says Hytner. “It’s unbelievable.”
But Ryder has nothing but praise for the local girls who played the local girls of 300 years ago. “All the girls are completely pivotal in the movie,” she says. “And none of them were in a movie before. Nick sat down with all of them and gave them a name and where they lived and what boy they liked, and a real history. His technique for getting us riled up was incredible. He had us play it like we were actually being attacked and possessed, not pretending. The word ‘pretend’ never came into play. And I overheard some of the girls complainging of weird hallucinations.”
So let’s see if we’ve got this straight–it sounds like something out of Pirandello, not Arthur Miller. “The Crucible” has local girls pretending to be local girls pretending to be possessed, and pulling it off by pretending that they’re not preten ding? There’s a similar nothing-is-real quality to the vision of Miller taking a jack hammer to the monument of modern theater he created. “He was the least respectful person of it,” says Hytner. “By the end, I was able to just call him up and say, ‘We c an’t afford to shoot such and such a scene; send me another, by fax, tomorrow, please.’ And it would come!” Was this Arthur Miller? And even Day-Lewis’s marriage two weeks ago to Miller’s daughter Rebecca, an actress and filmaker, sounds like something s omebody dreamed up. Poet laureate’s son weds … you know. Very Irving Wallace. The couple met because of the movie, but it was no on-set romance. During shooting, says Rebecca’s half-brother Bob, “Daniel was halfway between John Proctor and Daniel Day-Lewis.”
So our imaginary movie about the making of “The Crucible” seems headed for a closing montage of hearts and dollar signs. And not the least cheery aspect of this story is how faithfully the film preserves the play’s bracing cheerlessness. In Miller’ s rigorously Puritan critique of Puritanism, nobody gets off the hook: paranoia is a predictable perversion of the human spirit, doing right is rewarded only by the knowledge of having done it and a private surrender to passion brings down not just a pai r of lovers but a whole community. In reconfiguring the play as a film, Miller never considered letting John Proctor dodge the gallows. “That would have been like Hamlet getting into a Porche and driving off,” he says. In its time, “The Crucible” has shu cked off its dated specificity and soared above thousands of bum productions. Now it’s even survived, with its dignity intact, becoming what Fox calls (you guessed it) “a major motion picture”–the literary equivalent of the satanic pact. When that rope finally twangs and we fade to black, it may not seem like an upbeat ending. But for our story it is.
