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.

The crucible 1953