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The Crucible Movie Comparison

Decent Essays

The Crucible takes place during the Salem Witch Trails in 1692. It was originally written as a play in 1954 by Arthur Miller and was later adapted into a movie, directed by Nicolas Hytner. The movie falls into the historical fiction genre because it’s a fictional story based off of actual events. The film stayed fairly true to history, the characters were similar to the real people and their fates remained the same. Some parts of history had to be altered of dramatized to make the story line more entertaining for a typical audience. Although the story between Abigail Williams, the main antagonist, and John Proctor, the main protagonist, was fictional, The Crucible did a fantastic job of staying accurate to history. In the play The Crucible …show more content…

One way Nicolas Hytner dramatized the film was through the weather. In the beginning of the story, it was bright and sunny. As the trials began, the clouds darkened and as more people were convicted, the rain had intensified. For the film, this looked amazing and added to the weight of what was happening. This was obviously exaggerated because in real life, the weather didn’t actually become worse as the town plunged further into chaos. Furthermore, I’m assuming that some of the courtroom scenes were exaggerated, particularly when Mary Warren, the maidservant of John Proctor, was accusing Abigail Williams of lying to the court. In this scene, the afflicted girls had pulled multiple stunts to make Mary seem similar to a witch, including repeating Mary’s every word, saying that they see her spirit, and even fleeing the courtroom. I don’t doubt that Mary had accused Abigail and that the bewitched girls had actually tried to convince the court that Mary was a witch. However, I find their dramatic reaction to be slightly over-the-top. Most likely the afflicted girls had accused Mary until she stopped accusing them and probable didn’t run out of the church screaming until they had symbolically reached some water to cleanse

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