Original Title: Les sorcières de Salem
Year: 1957
Country: France
Language: French
Genre: Drama, History
Director: Raymond Rouleau
Screenwriter: Jean-Paul Sartre
based on the play by Arthur Miller
Music: Hanns Eisler
Cinematography: Claude Renoir
Editor: Marguerite Renoir
Cast:
Yves Montand
Simone Signoret
Mylène Demongeot
Jean Debucourt
Raymond Rouleau
Alfred Adam
Pascale Petit
Pierre Larquey
Françoise Lugagne
Jean Gaven
Jeanne Fusier-Gir
Michel Piccoli
Alexandre Rignault
Darling Legitimus
Chantal Gozzi
Gerd Michael Henneberg
Yves Brainville
Rating: 7.4/10
Year: 1996
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Drama, History
Director: Nicholas Hytner
Screenwriter: Arthur Miller
Music: George Fenton
Cinematography: Andrew Dunn
Editor: Tariq Anwar
Cast:
Daniel Day-Lewis
Winona Ryder
Paul Scofield
Joan Allen
Bruce Davison
Rob Campbell
Jeffrey Jones
Peter Vaughan
Karron Graves
Charlayne Woodard
Frances Conroy
Elizabeth Lawrence
George Gaynes
Mary Pat Gleason
Tom McDermott
Robert Breuler
Rating: 6.9/10
Two film adaptations of Arthur Miller’s seminal 1953 stage play THE CRUCIBLE, a partially fictionalized account of the notorious Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692-93, which, in Miller’s intention, is also a thinly veiled rebuttal to McCarthyism, which he would be enmeshed in several years later, and causes him being blacklisted in Hollywood after refusing to name names.
Such finger-pointing and principle-upholding is not so dissimilar from the story of THE CRUCIBLE, where an outburst of mass hysteria in the New World results in pernicious persecutions leveled at innocent folks, after the authority figures (judges, clergymen, the affluent), spurred by either God’s complex, political motives or money-grubbing, land-grabbing avarice, take as read the fanciful accusations from a cohort of teenage girls, who shams demonic possessions for fear of being punished for their innocuous love spell invocation. Among those girls, a vengeful Abigail Williams, who is the spurned lover of local farmer John Proctor, capitalizes on the opportunity to accuse John’s virtuous wife Elizabeth as a witch. It is a grave crime under pain of death, the accused must make a confession to save their own skins.
To debunk the falsehood of the girls’ vicious accusations, John appeals to the deputy governor-cum-judge Danforth, making a clean breast of his adultery with Abigail. Only his testimony is negated after an unwitting Elizabeth fails to corroborate it as she is consumed by her own share of guilt about the affair (her frigidity is to blame) and cannot bear to smear John’s repute. Consequently, out of irrepressible ire and despair, John utters the blasphemous “God is dead!” and is also arrested to be a witch. Facing the noose (Elizabeth is temporarily saved by a fortuitous pregnancy), John is tempted to make a confession, but at what cost? He must sell both his soul and good name to escape the noose, all because of what?
Both Rouleau’s black-and-white French version and Hytner’s colored US version stick to the plot with much fidelity. The former, scripted by Sartre with a piercingly astringent tang, has more details about the central love triangle. How the adultery turns sour and how the couple reconciles themselves with its aftermath. Abigial’s infatuation with John is so undimmed that it almost arouses audience’s sympathy towards her in the end, where she is spared and will be plagued by the grievous injustice and loss as long as she breathes. Meantime, the latter opens directly with the girls’ dusky, sylvan caper and composes a more compact, Manichaean narrative with no grey area to complicate the complexity of humanity (Abigail is heedlessly consigned as an absconder after being rebuffed by John, and that’s all she wrote. Bruce Davison’s Reverend Parris is an out-and-out anathema with no redeeming features). Hytner’s popularized, preachy approach is the go-to technique from Hollywood mainstream filmmaking, it is simpler to digest but Rouleau’s film has more integrity and gnawing conflicts to knock audience dead.
Pairing the French matinee stars and real-life couple Signoret and Montand as Elizabeth and John, Rouleau’s film allows them to expound on the plight of a husband’s unquenched libido and a wife’s inability to perform her marital duty with fervent candidness. Signoret’s Elizabeth is a rock of stillness and virtue, under her glacial surface, she is tormented by the only lie she ever utters, that pushes her husband closer to the noose. Her gaze in the climax is both haunting and haunted, yet, she is still lucid enough to know who should be held accountable. Montand is even better. John’s love/hate oscillation towards Abigail is the original sin that every man shall contend against, which Montand vivifies up to eleven in all its bareness and boldness, let alone the emotional swerves that propels the film to its heroic finale. The film also contributes the star turn for Demongeot, whose Abigail is a dainty, sultry amalgamation of evil and desire implanted upon a death-defying one-track mind: she wants what her heart desires, by hook or by crook. Lastly, Pascale Petit is an astonishing debutante as Mary Warren, the young maid whose fraught mutability serves up the living proof of the untrustworthy nature of a child’s play, and by extension, of the vileness of a twisted, bigoted, biased adult mind.
In Hytner’s film, Ryder’s Abigail and Day-Lewis’s John are the leads, they are merely fine (Ryder is deficient in intensity which Day-Lewis has too much to spare, but here, John’s martyrdom feels less poignant). Joan Allen rightly earns an Oscar nomination for playing Elizabeth, quite a beanpole of fortitude and a pillar of strength, whose voltage can even dim Day-Lewis’s during their exquisite heart-to-heart. Paul Scofield, taking his silver-screen curtain call as Judge Danforth (a role played with repellent monotony by Rouleau himself in the 1957 film), intriguingly transcends the role’s formal rigidity and abominable designation, entertains and sometimes bemuses audience with his mellow cadence and all those condescending, suspicious looks and glances. A perfect embodiment of disdain and self-regard, he is another villain one cannot get enough. Also, it is remiss not to mention Charlayne Woodard’s jaw-dropping cameo as Tituba, the Barbados slave who becomes the scapegoat of the girls’s mischief and sets the screen ablaze as a blatant manifestation of the unholy, racist victimization.
Peered through a presentism lens, Miller’s play cannot dispel the impression that it glorifies a man’s virility and dignity, often at the expense of a woman’s integrity (Elizabeth’s self-claimed culpability in John’s affair cannot sit comfortably with today’s ethos). A whiff of misogyny also billows out when young girls, those seemingly innocent, pure-hearted creatures, can simply go berserk and act weird en masse, deliberately do harm to others in league. Therefore, made nearly 40 years after, Hytner’s enterprise misses its chance to upcycle the material (one crucial reason may be that Miller himself is the sole screenwriter), and Rouleau’s version remains as a minor classic for all its luster flickering through the sins committed by our basest minds.
referential entries: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s DAY OF WRATH (1943, 7.5/10); George Cukor’s LET’S MAKE LOVE (1960, 6.2/10); Antonio Pietrangeli’s HUNGRY FOR LOVE (1960, 7.0/10); Martin Scorcese’s THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993, 7.9/10).
Cinema Omnivore 