Movie Report

The Crucible

The author of the play is Arthur Miller. His career as a playwright began while he was a student at the University of Michigan. Miller wrote “Death of a Salesman”, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Many critics describe it as the first great American tragedy, and Miller gained an associated eminence as a man who understood the deep essence of the United States. Drawing on research on the witch trials he had conducted while an undergraduate, Author Miller composed “The Crucible” in the early 1950s. Miller wrote the play during the brief ascendancy of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a demagogue whose vitriolic anti-Communism proved the spark needed to propel the United States into a dramatic and fractious anti-Communist fervor during these first tense years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. As with the alleged witches of Salem, suspected Communists were encouraged to confess and to identify other Red sympathizers as means of escaping punishment. The policy resulted in a whirlwind of accusations. Thus creating image that the United States was overrun with Communists and perpetuating the hysteria. The liberal entertainment industry, in which Miller worked, was one of his chief targets of these “witch hunts”. Some cooperated; others, like Miller, refused to give in to questioning, therefore, those who didn’t cooperate saw their careers suffer, as they were blacklisted from potential jobs for many years. The Crucible was a strict allegorical treatment of 1950s McCarthyism. But most of the time it is best read outside its historical context, as a faithful account of the Salem trials, but as a powerful and timeless depiction of how intolerance and hysteria can intersect and tear a community apart. In John Proctor, Miller gives the reader a marvelous tragic hero for any time- a flawed figure who finds his moral center just as everything is failing to pieces around him.

The play is about Puritan society. Puritans was the name given in the...