Today's DVD Purchase

I have seen The Crucible (1996) a few times and think it a very underrated film. The classical liberal in me loves it. Arthur Miller adapted the screenplay from his own play. One of the aspects of the film I most thoroughly enjoy is the 17th Century English, including Barbadan English. It also offers some great acting from Daniel Day-Lewis and Joan Allen. 17th Century New England is painstakingly recreated in this film, incuding the joyless Calvinism of our Puritan forebears. It dwells on one of my favorite themes: the inherent danger of the crowd. The film's main weakness is that it comes dangerously close to pooh-poohing the Devil and the very real and dangerous subject-matter of witchcraft, as so many moderns are apt to do.

There is one line in particular, uttered by the preisding judge, which illuminates the un-Catholic nature of the whole proceeding:

This is a new time. A precise time. We no longer live in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God's grace, the good folk and the evil entirely separate.

The Catholic recognizes this for the utopianism that it is.

I like "period" films for the same reason I used to like "foreign" movies; they allow the viewer to experience, however artificially, a time and place he would otherwise never be able to experience. Books, of course, offer this as well, and it is even better to read widely.