![]() Two of them, including Ruth Putnam (Ashley Peldon) fall into an unwakeable sleep, leading most of Salem’s townsfolk to fear witchcraft has taken hold of their fair town. The girls are caught in the act by Reverend Parris (Bruce Davison). 17-year-old Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder), the ringleader of the girls, even kills a chicken and smeared its blood on her face to try and fatally curse a man’s wife! The sound design mixes their laughter to a monstrous pitch while the score amps up the drama and menace of the whole thing. Here, though, only one or two girls actually disrobe, which doesn’t really mitigate that they all threw herbs and plants into a boiling cauldron to cast love charms under the guidance of the Barbadoan slave Tituba (Charlayne Woodard). Hytner’s adaptation opens by dramatizing the play’s unseen inciting incident, where one night a group of Salem’s daughters are caught dancing naked in the woods and are accused of performing witchcraft in the name of Satan. Where Shine presented an opportunity to check off a box I knew I wouldn’t check off without outside incentive, returning to The Crucible was a chance to find out once and for all how it holds up to the faded memories of a semi-interested high schooler. ![]() Arthur Miller’s retelling of these events in The Crucible is so universally well known, but how much the 1996 film adaptation is part of that legacy? I first saw the film in my junior high English class (I’d already chewed through Miller’s play and Death of a Salesman before I was ever assigned them), and aside from a few indelible images of Joan Allen’s silent devastation at court or Daniel Day-Lewis’s artfully grimy self in prison, Nicholas Hytner’s rendition of The Crucible didn’t leave much of an impression. ![]() Happy belated Thanksgiving, TFE readers! In the spirit of American History, here’s a nice slice of cinema on one of the US’s many exemplary passages of telling on itself: the Salem Witch Trials. ![]()
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