Capitalism, in the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say, its final poisoned bloom having been Italian and German Fascism. Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red-especially Italy, where the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became an expanding empire. McCarthy’s power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler’s snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat’s eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick. Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling-if you remember the fear he once spread.
They watched as Hitler, facing a vast stadium full of adoring people, went up on his toes in ecstasy, hands clasped under his chin, a sublimely self-gratified grin on his face, his body swivelling rather cutely, and they giggled at his overacting. I remember how in 1964, only twenty years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of “Incident at Vichy,” showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. Fear doesn’t travel well just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory’s truth. I remember those years-they formed “The Crucible” ’s skeleton-but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. But there they are-Daniel Day-Lewis (John Proctor) scything his sea-bordered field, Joan Allen (Elizabeth) lying pregnant in the frigid jail, Winona Ryder (Abigail) stealing her minister-uncle’s money, majestic Paul Scofield (Judge Danforth) and his righteous empathy with the Devil-possessed children, and all of them looking as inevitable as rain. In a way, there is a biting irony in this film’s having been made by a Hollywood studio, something unimaginable in the fifties. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly fifty years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly. As I watched “The Crucible” taking shape as a movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth of time that it represents for me kept returning to mind.
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