movie review for the crucible

The Crucible

The first scene in "The Crucible" strikes the first wrong note. We are in Salem, Mass., in 1692. 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. 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.

Miller's play is about religious hysteria fanned by repressed and denied sexual lust. 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. When the play was first produced, it was easily decoded as an allegory about the anti-communist frenzy of the McCarthy period. Today, ironically, we have come full circle; we are no longer paranoid about communists, but we are once again paranoid about Satan-worship.

Perhaps every age gets the "Crucible" it deserves. 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. (Would Satanism die out altogether if not for the zeal of its opponents in publicizing it?) At the center of the story of "The Crucible" is one moment of unguarded lust, in which a good man named John Proctor ( Daniel Day-Lewis ) commits adultery with a saucy wench named Abigail Williams ( Winona Ryder ), his servant girl. She is one of the naked moonlight dancers, and is furious because she was rejected by a repentant Proctor, and dismissed by Proctor's wife Elizabeth ( Joan Allen ). After being witnessed in the midnight revels by the Rev. Parris ( Bruce Davison ) and charged with unholy behavior, she counters with accusations against Proctor.

Parris is a narrow man but not a bad one. He brings in a consultant, Rev. Hale (Rob Campbell), who forces one of the other revelers to confess. (She is a slave from Barbados who allegedly tutored the local girls, although it is hard to imagine class and racial barriers being so easily crossed at that time.) Soon the whole village is abroil with accusations and counter-accusations. Hale begins to suspect some of the motives, but events have been set inexorably in motion. An experienced witchhunter, Judge Danforth ( Paul Scofield ), is brought to town, takes an early hard line against witchcraft, and then finds it impossible to back down, even as the evidence seems to be evaporating. He fears losing face--and believes obscurely that *someone* should be punished, lest witchcraft seem to be condoned. This is of course the same dilemma faced by all Satan-floggers: Without Satanists to flog, they'd be out of a job.

These threads lead to a climax in which the accused are required to admit to their guilt or be executed. We know all the players--who is guilty, who is innocent, what the issues are--and yet the film's climactic scenes lack a certain urgency. As Proctor stands on the scaffold, making his moral stand, we are less than persuaded. The story has all the right moves and all the correct attitudes, but there is something lacking at its core; I think it needs less frenzy and more human nature.

The characters I believed in most were Elizabeth Proctor, the Rev. Hale, and Judge Danforth. As written and acted, they seem like plausible people doing their best in an impossible situation. Too many of the others seem like fictional puppets. The village girls in general (and Abigail Williams in particular) don't even seem to belong to the 17th century; as they scurry hysterically around the village, they act like they've seen too many movies. And as John Proctor, Daniel Day-Lewis has the task of making moral stands that are noble, yes, but somehow pro forma. "The Crucible" is a drama of ideas, but they seem laid on top of the material, not organically part of it.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Paul Scofield as Judge Danforth
• Joan Allen as Elizabeth Proctor
• Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams
• Daniel Day-Lewis as John Proctor
• Bruce Davison as Reverend Parris

Screenplay by

• Arthur Miller

Directed by

• Nicholas Hytner

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Parents' guide to, the crucible.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 3 Reviews
• Kids Say 6 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Plodding film based on play has mature themes, sex, violence

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Crucible is an intense 1996 exploration of the Salem witch trials based on Arthur Miller's play. It delves into the basest human instincts: violence, self-protection, lust, hypocrisy, territorialism, paranoia, and crowd mania. Religious fervor is shown in its worst light,…

Why Age 14+?

This world is merciless and violent. With no evidence, so-called witches and ser

Abigail tries to reignite a past affair with Procter. She kisses him passionatel

"God," "Lord," and "damn."

Adults drink wine.

Any Positive Content?

People lie and accuse others to save themselves. Honest people are sometimes pun

Abigail, who loves Proctor, deflects blame for her dancing and conjuring spells

Parents need to know that The Crucible is an intense 1996 exploration of the Salem witch trials based on Arthur Miller's play. It delves into the basest human instincts: violence, self-protection, lust, hypocrisy, territorialism, paranoia, and crowd mania. Religious fervor is shown in its worst light, with so-called sinners accusing others of sin. Religious and political leaders, as well as judges and neighbors, prove to be corrupt and self-serving. Expect brief nudity: From afar and in fog, a girl's buttocks and breasts are briefly shown. A married man discusses a past affair with a young single woman. They kiss, then he pushes her away violently. There is talk of hanging as punishment for refusing to admit to witchcraft, and hanging is briefly seen. Servants are beaten and smacked. A man is tortured and ultimately crushed to death when townspeople place heavy rocks on his chest to induce him to inform on others. A girl smashes a rooster to the ground, then smears her face with its blood. The 17th-century language echoing Salem witch trial transcripts may pose a challenge for young modern viewers.

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Violence & Scariness

This world is merciless and violent. With no evidence, so-called witches and servants of the devil are rabidly pursued, jailed, and hanged. Abigail and others bring false charges of devilry and witchery against innocents to wipe their hands clean of lesser offenses. A man is tortured and ultimately crushed to death when townspeople place heavy rocks on his chest to induce him to inform on others. Alleged purveyors of witchcraft are threatened with hanging, and hanging is briefly shown. Servants are beaten and smacked. A woman kisses a man and he pushes her away, to the ground. Girls dramatically pretend to faint and fall to the ground. A girl smashes a rooster to the ground, then smears her face with its blood. Abigail angrily hits her younger cousin.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Abigail tries to reignite a past affair with Procter. She kisses him passionately, but he pushes her away. A girl's buttocks and breasts are shown briefly and foggily through dim light.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

People lie and accuse others to save themselves. Honest people are sometimes punished rather than rewarded for their honesty. People sometimes risk death to stand up for their principles.

Positive Role Models

Abigail, who loves Proctor, deflects blame for her dancing and conjuring spells by claiming others brought the devil into her. Jealous of Proctor's wife, Elizabeth, Abigail accuses her of contact with the devil and gets Elizabeth thrown into jail. Girls faint, pretending that the devil is in them. Honest people come forward to defend falsely accused friends, and they are arrested by a corrupt government for their efforts.

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (6)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Great acting

Exceptional, what's the story.

THE CRUCIBLE pits good against evil. Orphan Abigail ( Winona Ryder ) has been dismissed from the employ of John ( Daniel Day-Lewis ) and Elizabeth Proctor ( Joan Allen ) after Elizabeth learns John has had an affair with the younger woman. When Abigail and other young women "conjure spirits" in the woods, hoping this will make Proctor come back to her, she is discovered by her uncle, the priggish hard-liner Rev. Parris ( Bruce Davison ). Fearing ruination and punishment, Parris and Abigail accuse others of putting the devil into the girls. Abigail wants vengeance against her rival and accuses Elizabeth of being in cahoots with the devil. John admits to adultery to expose Abigail's vindictive scheme but gets himself hanged when he refuses to admit a falsehood -- that the devil came to him as well.

Is It Any Good?

This overlong, didactic history lesson can be a tough slog for even avid students of this black period in American history. Playwright Arthur Miller wrote the play in 1953, paralleling accusations of witchcraft with equally hysterical accusations of Communism through post-World War II America, a political strategy that ruined the lives of many blacklisted men and women. The decision to mimic 17th-century speech, with its jarring locutions and odd verb tenses, can be off-putting and stiffens a plot that might otherwise be more engaging. Daniel Day-Lewis is persuasive as Proctor, but all the fainting, crying, and hysteria make for a lot of scenery chewing.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the historical circumstances under which Miller wrote The Crucible , using the Salem witch trials to parallel power gone unchecked in 1950s American leaders, who labeled their political opponents Communist.

Why do you think someone who speaks the truth might be seen as a threat to society?

Do you think religious beliefs should play a role in how government is run? Why, or why not?

Do you think the fact that John Proctor was a flawed man made him a stronger or weaker voice of protest against the corruption of the accusers?

Movie Details

• In theaters : January 25, 1996
• On DVD or streaming : June 1, 2004
• Cast : Daniel Day-Lewis , Winona Ryder , Joan Allen , Paul Scofield
• Director : Nicholas Hytner
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Twentieth Century Fox
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : History
• Run time : 124 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : for intense depiction of the Salem witch trials
• Last updated : January 26, 2023

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Movie Review: 'The Crucible'

All your high school English class memories of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible won’t prepare you for the scene that opens Nicholas Hytner’s joltingly powerful new movie version. In 1692, a group of teenage girls gather in the woods of Salem, Mass., to conduct an unholy ritual. In the predawn twilight, they writhe, dance, and bare their breasts in the dusky mist. One of them, Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder), goes further still — she lets down her flowing dark hair and drinks animal blood, a witchcraft charm to destroy the wife of the man she loves. In The Crucible , which was first performed in 1953, Arthur Miller applies the torch of melodrama to the history of the Salem witch trials, a case of ”justice” gone hysterical, and the hysteria of this Black Mass prologue is all too real. The reason you won’t remember it is that it’s not in the original play: Miller, who has retooled his work for the screen, added the sequence to make visible what was left to our imaginations before. Such literal-mindedness usually takes away more than it adds. In this case, however, it sets a mood of eroticized fear and delirium that reverberates throughout the movie.

Hytner, who directed 1994’s The Madness of King George (also adapted from the stage), has done something startling with Miller’s stately popular classic: He has made it pulsate with dramatic energy. And what a play it is — the definition of rock-solid middlebrow excitement. The devil may not be alive in Salem, but, as the movie makes clear, he lives — zestfully — in the minds of these young girls. They want to conjure the forbidden, to experience the sensuality and madness driven underground by a frigid, repressed society, and when they’re observed in the woods by Abigail’s uncle, the Reverend Parris (Bruce Davison), and put on trial for witchcraft, it sets off an insidious chain reaction of accusal, denial, and guilt, with denial becoming the ”proof” of guilt. (Who but a witch needs to lie?) We’re seeing a community engulfed by paranoia, but also by a rite of sensationalism: the devil made flesh.

The devil has his uses, too. While working as a servant, Abigail had a secret love affair with John Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis), a farmer alienated from his primly devout wife, Elizabeth (Joan Allen). The affair ended when Abigail was dismissed. But she’s still in love with John, and she seizes the opportunity to accuse Elizabeth — the most pious woman in town — of witchcraft. Ryder, usually a soft, placid actress, unleashes a bold new anger here. It’s a schoolgirl’s fit made demonic — spite magnified to destruction by the power of a society’s hypocrisy. Guilty by association with his wife, John has to prove his righteous mettle by reeling off the Ten Commandments from memory. The audacity of his accusers becomes comic in its sinisterness.

Hytner works in a punchy, combustible style, sweeping his camera through the sunny fields of Salem, using wide-angle lenses to make the actors’ faces pop off the screen. The rhythmic-visual zap is more than electrifying — it summons the rage and recrimination that can sweep through a community like wildfire. Spurred on by the white-maned Judge Danforth (Paul Scofield), who arrives with ambiguous motives to oversee the trials, the residents of Salem discover that there’s power in numbers. As long as they confess, they won’t hang; as long as they deplore the devil, they’re united in having an enemy. The ”witches,” who seem ostracized from the community, are, in fact, its secret soul.

Miller’s play, of course, used the witch trials as a daringly transparent allegory for McCarthyism. Seeing it now, I can’t claim that I was struck by any dazzling new topical parallels. Yes, events in our time have inspired elements of a witch-hunt atmosphere — accusations of child abuse in day-care centers, say, that turned out to be groundless. But the witches of Salem were an imaginary threat (as, for the most part, was the ”Communist conspiracy” of the ’50s), and child abuse, unjust as individual claims of it may be, is all too real. The way The Crucible speaks to us today has less to do with any specific instance of collective indictment than it does with the relentless group-think mentality of modern America, where people, crushed under by a bureaucratic/consumerist/media culture, rely more and more on forces outside themselves to determine what to like, what to say, what to believe. In the movie, Judge Danforth exploits the fire-and-brimstone passions of Salem, a community half in thrall to the devil it’s trying to destroy, but he ends up presiding over a crucible of conformity. Confess — that is, see it our way — and you’ll be free.

As vividly imagined as The Crucible is, it’s up to the actors to animate the stern Puritan cadences of Miller’s dialogue. They bring it off spectacularly. Day-Lewis doesn’t have any tricks to rely on this time — even his New England accent is understated — but in scenes like the one where he confesses his adultery in court, he burrows into the soul of John Proctor’s stubborn decency, his unwillingness to grasp that the truth is the last thing that’s going to protect him. Scofield, eyes boring into all comers, wraps his great basso profundo around lines like ”Now we shall touch the bottom of this swamp .” Judge Danforth’s true obsession isn’t the devil but his own power, his ability to make a good man twist in the wind. It’s Joan Allen who carries the weight of the film’s sorrow, eyes glistening with woe as she delivers the heartbreaking confession to her husband that she kept a ”cold house.” It’s a moment to give you the shivers, because it reveals Elizabeth Proctor as the original sinner of Salem — a woman so moral she creates the devil out of wishing him away. A

Related Articles

The Crucible

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Confess it! you’re really dreading seeing The Crucible , fearing a high-minded thesis of numbing good intentions. Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the witch trials in Salem, Mass, circa 1692, is freighted with enough background history to require a catch-up quiz.

True or false:

(1) Miller’s play parallels the Red-baiting hysteria of the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee, run by a rabid Senator Joe McCarthy, equated communism with satanism. (True.)

(2) Miller was cited for contempt when he refused to betray friends in the Communist Party by naming names or to urge his wife, Marilyn Monroe, to submit to a photo op with the HUAC chief. (True.)

(3) Current parallels to witch hunts include religious fundamentalism, political correctness, accusations of child abuse at day-care centers and the demonizing of race, abortion, AIDS and rock. (True.)

(4) You need to know all these things to understand and appreciate The Crucible. (False.)

Miller is the first to admit that the tale must stand on its own. The playwright, now 81, sat near me at a screening of The Crucible , unwittingly intimidating all around him. For the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Death of a Salesman , attention must be paid. Miller asked for none of it. He talked with boyish zest of working with director Nicholas Hytner on re-crafting The Crucible as a $25 million film that would allow startling imagery to resonate with his language and burst the bounds of the stage.

Does it ever. The Crucible, despite some damaging cuts to the text, is a seductively exciting film that crackles with visual energy, passionate provocation and incendiary acting. The mood is electric from the first scene, when 15 sex-starved teenage girls gather in the Salem forest at night to work out their Puritan repression. Tituba (Charlayne Woodard), a slave from Barbados, has organized a conjuring around a boiling kettle. The girls, boiling with lust, shout the names of boys they desire. Some tear off their clothes and dance naked. Not Betty (Rachael Bella), the daughter of Rev. Parris (Bruce Davison), who recoils as her 17-year-old cousin Abigail (Winona Ryder) bashes a rooster against the kettle and drinks its blood as a charm to kill Elizabeth (Joan Allen), the scolding, sickly wife of farmer John Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis). Abigail had worked for the couple and their two sons until Elizabeth discovered John’s adultery with Abigail and fired her for being a whore.

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This “witching” — a child’s fatal attraction misread as devil worship — is talked about but never dramatized in Miller’s play. Onscreen, Miller’s words are made flesh. Guilt over being caught drives the girls into a frenzy of false accusations. The devil made them do it. Abigail conveniently cites Elizabeth Proctor for witchcraft. The others pick up on the trick, naming anyone they ever resented until 19 are sentenced to hang by Judge Danforth (Paul Scofield), a deputy governor as avid to make his reputation as McCarthy was.

Miller’s screenplay is a model of adventurous film adaptation, showing a master eager to mine his most-performed play for fresh insights instead of embalming it. Hytner, the British theater wiz who made an auspicious 1994 film debut with The Madness of King George, directs with a keen eye. Shooting on Hog Island, Mass., a wildlife sanctuary off the coast, allows Hytner to catch raw nature — the hysterical girls rush into the sea, claiming an evil yellow bird is chasing them from court — and spur the actors to interpretive risks.

Ryder finds the lost child in Abigail, who is usually played as a calculating Lolita. Before unleashing her rage, Abigail presses her face to John’s and grabs his crotch. Though he rejects her now, John was once the carnal aggressor. “And now you bid me go dead to all you taught me?” says Abigail, for whom sex is just the short route to a soft word. John, for all his late-blooming principles, has corrupted her youth. Ryder offers a transfixing portrait of warped innocence.

The great Scofield is triumphant, avoiding the easy caricature of Danforth as a fanatic. He brings the role something new: wit. We laugh with this judge, which heightens the horror later when he blinds himself to truth in the name of God and his own ambition. The scene in which he ignores Rev. Hale (Rob Campbell), who knows the girls are faking, and bullies the servant Mary Warren (Karron Graves) into delusion and madness chills the blood.

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As the unforgiving wife whose “justice would freeze beer,” in the words of her husband, Allen is an absolute stunner in an award-caliber performance that is also a surprising source of warmth. By the seashore, where the pregnant Elizabeth has come to say goodbye to her condemned husband, she tells John, “I once counted myself so plain, so poorly made, that no honest love could come to me.” Elizabeth’s scene of tender reconciliation is the film’s moral core. John need only sign a false confession of witchcraft to save himself from the gallows. Of course, he won’t. “Because it is my name,” he tells Danforth simply. “Because I cannot have another in my life.”

In the film’s most complex role, Day-Lewis performs with quiet power. Playing nobility can make actors insufferable, but Day-Lewis keeps John Proctor human even when saddled with smudgy makeup and fake brown teeth for his final scene. The Crucible , for all its timely denunciation of persecution masked as piety — take that, Christian right! — comes down to individual resistance and how you search your heart to find it. The years haven’t softened the rage against self-betrayal in The Crucible. This stirring film lets you feel the heat of Miller’s argument and the urgent power of his kick.

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• Cast & crew

User reviews

The Crucible

I am not someone to randomly give out a perfect score for a movie....

• sugar_n_spice
• Sep 21, 2006

Bubble Bubble Toil & Trouble...

• Mar 4, 2024

Wicked movie

• ironhorse_iv
• Nov 20, 2012

Powerful telling which uses the camera well to open the play up

• bob the moo
• May 3, 2003

excellent adaptation for the screen

• Apr 19, 2003

Sobering And Chaotic - In Keeping With The Subject Matter

• Apr 9, 2011

Eye opener on real events

• Sep 10, 2022

One of the finest plays in history is turned into a cinematic masterpiece.

• Oct 17, 2007

Forceful and Powerful

• Jun 2, 2008

Not just a dynamic character study, but a study of madness. **** (out of four)

• Oct 24, 2002

Somewhat Melodramatic re-telling of the Salem Witch Trials

• Mar 26, 2019

Just fantastic

• May 19, 1999

Bullying Is An Ancient Art.

• Aug 31, 2015

These Witches Sure Can Yell

• evanston_dad
• Jun 15, 2009

What is truth?

• Mar 3, 1999

Would you rather sell your soul to clear your name or soil your name to save your life?

• ElMaruecan82
• Nov 22, 2022

Good look at how gullible religious people can be.

• derekprice1974
• Aug 26, 2004

Well made...unpleasant viewing.

• planktonrules
• Feb 20, 2022

The Magic Of Arthur Miller

• Feb 27, 2017

Great Performances!

• Mar 27, 2013

Beautiful study of mass hypnosis

• lagthirteen
• Apr 23, 2021

Star rating: 3 out of 5

• jennifer_litchfield
• Dec 2, 2003

Impressing and well-done

• danielll_rs
• Oct 8, 1999

OK, nothing to write home about

• curlyman217
• Apr 22, 2008

Relevant but inert

• Jan 5, 2015

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The Crucible Reviews

The Crucible benefits from an increasingly compelling midsection and second half focused on Day-Lewis’ commanding figure...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 2, 2024

Raymond Rouleau’s French-East German coproduction should provide something of a revelation...

Full Review | Nov 30, 2023

Finally transformed into a chilling and expressive film by Nicholas Hytner, director of The Madness of King George, Miller's script remains a razor-sharp interrogation of religious dread, mob rule, and, most of all, sexual hysteria.

Full Review | Dec 27, 2022

The Crucible earned two Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress (Allen) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Miller), but it should have received many more, including one for Best Picture -- it's truly one of the great forgotten films of its era.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 10, 2022

Perhaps understanding the distance that these fictional interpretations have created, The Crucible seems to invite a moral and emotional, rather then political reading.

Full Review | Dec 7, 2018

The miracle of Nicholas Hytner's rigorous, taut film arises from its ability to capture the high theatricality of its life in the theater.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 5, 2018

A competent, uncontroversial, rather shouty version of a play which is now safely canonical and, if the philistinism may be forgiven, less remarkable than it once seemed, when dramas of the liberal conscience had an urgent edge.

Full Review | Dec 5, 2018

The clarity of the direction and the quality of the acting make it the best rendition of the author's work that any of us is likely to see either on screen or on stage.

Full Review | Mar 2, 2018

Plodding film based on play has mature themes, sex, violence

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 26, 2016

Then there's always Mr. Scofield, bringing an almost unbearable, yet entirely believable, lightness of spirit to his loathsome character. It's a bold stroke by a great actor, making zealotry and evil seem positively beneficent.

Full Review | May 17, 2013

I recommend Hytner's movie highly, but a part of me resists a work that makes the audience feel as noble in our moral certainty as the characters it invites us to deplore. Some part of its power seems borrowed from the thing it hates.

Her cheeks flush, her winsome beauty seared with erotic rage, Ryder exposes the real roots of the piece. Forget McCarthyism; The Crucible is a colonial Fatal Attraction.

Too bad, though, that The Crucible fails to probe deeper into the sexual, religious, and political conditions that can give false accusations so much power -- even today.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 17, 2013

Arthur Miller's screenplay keeps everything nice and faithful to the period, and the actors have the dirt on their hands to prove it. The movie lacks polish as well, and that's to everyone's benefit.

A McCarthy-era retelling of the Salem witch trials, Arthur Miller's 1953 play is a literary classic, but this adap falls short.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 17, 2013

The story's sickening spiral into madness is preserved.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 17, 2013

An intelligent and gripping epic.

I very much admire how Hytner... keeps the pace swift and doesn't fetishize the 17th-century decors and clothes. But I can't help feeling that in more ways than one, The Crucible is a period piece.

What happened in long-ago Salem does still seem to matter.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 17, 2013

The story is unchanged, but its theme relates surprisingly well to today's versions of the bias and scapegoating that Miller rightly deplores.