The Crucible - Noni, You Devil!

Pam writes:

It is always a good thing when two of our interests come together. In this case it is Winona Ryder and Rebecca Nurse  - one of the first victims of the Salem witch trials, and Pam's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother.

In this movie, based on Arthur Miller's play of the same name, Our Winona plays Abigail Williams, the instigator of the witch hunt. Abigail is the ring leader of a group of several young women and girls who accuse their neighbors of dancing with the devil. Daniel Day-Lewis plays John Proctor, a former (married) lover of Abigail. Abigail accuses John's wife Elizabeth of witchcraft in the hopes of getting her out of the way. Elizabeth Lawrence plays Pam's ancestor.

Ryder is wonderful in this film. She shows a range of emotion, (some of which is pretense on Abigail's part). There are some historical inaccuracies in the film, but overall one gets the idea of how superstitious folks were, and how those superstitions played into their fears. We also get a pretty strong sense of the conditions of the jails, and the injustice of the the "justice system".

James adds:

A third interest in this film, of course, is geography, though the family connection and Winona involvement that Pam mentions are also crucial. The film was shot in at least six locations, though IMDb (as of this writing) lists only five. The one missing from IMDb is the most important, and is also the only one that is historically accurate.

GoogleMaps has changed, so the embedded version does not work well. Please explore this map in more detail, noting that the yellow markers are for memorial sites that are neither in the film nor in the original events. 

As with a lot of films -- especially those representing an earlier period in time -- a far-flung set of locations was needed to take advantage of places that have the appearance of a single location in an earlier age. Plimoth Plantation, for example, was carefully constructed in the 20th century to resemble a 17th-century settlement. And from what I can discern from online images, the harbor area of Shelburne, Nova Scotia resembles the harbor area of Salem, but perhaps without overhead wires.

The interesting geography here is that these great efforts are undertaken to maintain a geographic misconception about the events described. The trials were in Salem, but as with Bridgewater and many other Massachusetts towns, Salem was a much bigger town at the time. The entire witch-trial story took place in the part of the town where Rebecca Nurse resided, and which is now in Danvers.

See note above regarding this map.

Rebecca Nurse was among the more prosperous members of the community, and amazingly, her house and grounds remain intact, though all of the historic and commercial remembrances of the trial itself are in the harbor area that remains part of Salem. What IMDb fails to note is that much of The Crucible was actually filmed on her homestead, both in and around her house and in a meeting house built on the homestead specifically for the production.

All films require a great deal of planning, of course, but the planning for this one must have been extraordinary, creating an illusion that would work well for viewers who have not been to the various filming locations. Often we see characters moving almost seamlessly from Danvers to Plymouth to Ipswich, as if they were walking across a single lawn.

The Rebecca Nurse Homestead is both beautiful and profoundly moving, as it includes a memorial build by some of her other descendants. When we visited, our guide was a very young man who was very well versed and clearly conscientious about his role as an interpreter of the site. It is well worth a visit, or at least a Facebook "like" -- yes the Homestead has well over a thousand Facebook followers ...

Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls