The Crucible
With Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Joan Allen
Written by Arthur Miller
Directed by Nicolas Hytner
(1996)
by Manuel Release
You won’t see Daniel Day-Lewis’ ding-a-ling in The Crucible because it’s a mainstream movie and no actor in a mainstream movie ever shows his ding-a-ling, unless he’s Richard Gere (Breathless) or Harvey Keitel (The Piano), or unless the movie is French or Italian like Marco Ferreri’s The Last Woman, in which the young Gerard Depardieu not only displays a formidable ding-a-ling in a fully erect state, but visibly inserts it into a fully-extended Ornella Mutti (missionary).
But hey, folks, this is America, home of freedom of expression – which means essentially that the only bodies ever shown fully nude in both soft-core and mainstream films are womens’. In this sense, The Crucible may be enjoyed in tandem with Anal Revolution. Maybe American Playhouse will sponsor a double bill.
The Crucible opens with a midnight voodoo ritual in Puritan Salem where there’s a flash of nubile breasts and buttocks, not to mention a nasty santeria episode that involves Winona Ryder killing a chicken and drinking its blood.
All I can say is, it sure would have spiced up that tepid, mainstream Little Women if only Gillian Armstrong had dared to give us full-frontal, gross-out Louisa May Alcott.
Seriously,The Crucible is Arthur Miller’s witch-hunt melodrama, politically daring in its Redbaiting time (1953) and thus untouchable by mainstream Hollywood standards… until now. Daniel Day-Lewis is John Proctor, the tortured farmer who cheats on his stuffy wife, played by Pat Nixon (Joan Allen), with psychotic maidservant Ryder who, once the witch hunt gets underway with angry villagers and mass hangings, takes revenge on stuffy Pat by crying “witch” on her.
Personally, I would have preferred a Puritan love triangle of Al Pacino, Angie Dickinson and Seka – but that just shows you where my head’s at.
The movie (shot locally in Ipswich Bay) is ART. We know it’s ART because ARThur Miller wrote the screenplay, compressing his original play to within an inch of its overwrought life and compressed further still by director Nicholas (The Madness of King George) Hytner, with the added touch of Shakespearean actor Paul Scfield as the hanging judge, a raging asshole in a tall buckled hat. Scofield browbeats everyone and climbs in and out of carriages and buildings a lot just as he did in Peter Brook’s King Lear (1971), which Hytner further alludes to in a moving winter beach interlude between Day-Lewis and Allen.
The flick could use an extra twenty minutes so we can get our bearings: there’s just too much running in and out of buildings and screaming and too many jump cuts to catch the implacable momentum of Miller’s text. And of course, no ding-a-lings – although you will get to see hunky Day-Lewis’ hairy chest, flashing Celtic peepers, and perfect teeth, which, by the gallows finale, have deteriorated to a blue as blue as the filter in the night scenes.
