Differences Between The Crucible Play And Movie

The film based on the 1952 play The Crucible by Arthur Miller did a commendable job at an accurate portrayal of the play. But in any book, or in this case, play to movie conversion, some differences occur. The few differences that stand are not important enough to sway the fact that the movie did an excellent job of portraying the play.
One of the biggest differences between the play and the movie is the dramatization of everything, they show all seances with something that the play could not deliver by itself. One example of this is the opening scene, we see Abby violently swinging around a dead chicken and then smash its neck open, and proceed to drink the blood. This violent display was show in the play to be more calmly done. A whole other difference is the placement of the scene, the movie having the whole dancing in the forest scene at the very beginning of the movie, whilst the dancing in the forest portion of the play is learned about more and more through the girls talking about it after the fact.
Another very small example showing how the movie did not stay completely true to the play is an
The movie, like most movies, try to keep the watcher engaged and entertained, not confused or bored. So like lots of movies, The Crucible did take out a good amount of dialogue, and altered other lines to make the viewer more comfortable and engaged. An example of this is found with the character Cheever. In the play Cheever has many lines of dialogue and plays a bigger part in the progression of the plays story. However, in watching the movie, it’s seen that Cheever only talks, and is prominent in the story only a handful of times throughout the entire runtime. All of these differences do add up, but even with all of them put together, they don’t really seem to matter, for they don’t compromise the story's