The Crucible Review

Arthur Miller adapted his own play here, and the first thing the film does is push it outdoors. Nicholas Hytner opens on the girls dancing in the woods before dawn and shoots most of Salem on the wind scoured coast of Massachusetts, so the hysteria has weather around it instead of proscenium walls. That gambit works. What works better is Paul Scofield as Judge Danforth, who plays the man not as a villain but as an administrator who has worked out that the court cannot be wrong without him being finished, and Joan Allen as Elizabeth Proctor, whose whole performance lives in a held jaw and a refusal to look at her husband.

Day-Lewis gives Proctor a farmer's tiredness early so that the courtroom explosion later costs something. The weak seam is Winona Ryder. Abigail has to be a frightened teenager and a strategist at once, and Ryder plays her at one temperature, loud, so the manipulation reads as tantrum rather than calculation. The middle third also trusts shouting too much; three consecutive scenes climax at the same volume and blur together. The cell scene survives all of it, Proctor signing the confession and then tearing it, with Scofield watching a machine he built fail to close.