Movies are all about entertaining the audience. The viewers want
to see exiting, fascinating movies. And it’s not easy to create such a movie. Often
facts are passed over because they don’t fit in the story. And more often,
facts get changed in a more interesting way. In the following paragraphs I’m going
to check the movie “The Crucible” in those aspects.
Although The Crucible was originally written as a play,
Arthur Miller decided to make a movie out of it. And that’s not easy. You have
to fit the very well developed characters of the play in a movie and present
the story in an interesting, capturing way. But you still need a few new
things, your own touch in the movie. And Miller did a great job with it. The
first thing he did was he changed the beginning. The original one was just a
description of a room and therefore not usable for a movie opener. It’s too
boring and doesn’t capture the audience. So he changes it. He gets rid of the
original scene and creates a fictional one in which he lets a group of young
woman dance around a fire in the forest. The perfect symbol for the topic of
the film – Witchcraft. Now he has the attention of the audience. Next to that
he changes the appearance of many of the characters. So he made John Proctor a
lot younger. In reality he was 60 years old. In the movie he is presented as a
guy in his 30s. Also his affair with Abigail Williams is fictional to dramatize
the story. Also she was eleven and not seventeen years old.
Furthermore, he shrinks down the number of characters in order to
make the film easier to understand. So he symbolizes the several judges with
their opinions and believes in just two judges. He also decreases the number of
girls in the “crying out” for the same reason: Too many characters only confuse
the audience because it’s not possible to develop all of them far enough in the
story to make sense. Additionally, he renamed some of the characters in order
to avoid the confusion of similar names. So he renamed Ann Putnam Junior into
Ruth Putnam so that the audience wouldn't confuse her with her mother, Ann
Putnam Senior.
Arthur Miller and Nicholas Hytner did a good job in putting the
story of the Salem witch trials into a movie. Although there are many
historical inaccuracies like the witch dance in the forest at the beginning, it’s
still a good, and mostly accurate movie. Many things were simplified or
reduced, but I think that’s acceptable because this is a movie meant for
entertainment. It’s not a documentation and should neither be a primary source
for any kind of investigation. But that doesn’t mean the movie is totally wrong.
It gives you the gist of what happened in Salem at that time. And it does what
it was meant for: It entertains.
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