This revival of Arthur Miller's witch-hunt allegory, set in 17th-century Salem but really about McCarthyism, comes along far too late to retain a scrap of its original courage. It has a hard enough time retaining a scrap of seriousness. The all-girl gang of devil-raisers, scurrying and screeching with carefully rehearsed oneness, appears forever to be trying to break into the genre of West Side Story. Their climactic chorus of "I saw Goody Goode with the Devil! I saw Goody Osborne with the Devil!" lacks only a melody by Andrew Lloyd Webber. And even the dignified Paul Scofield, through his dazzling vocal gymnastics, seems to argue that if Rex Harrison could sing, so can he too. Nicholas Hytner, the stage director who brought The Madness of King George to the screen, isn't yet a screen director. His naive and indiscriminate use of the wide-angle lens for dramatic underlining is sufficient proof of that. And the touchingly written scene between Daniel Day-Lewis and Joan Allen, struggling with the pros and cons of a false confession, is wrecked by the welter of mismatching shots. (Now you see her hand on his shoulder, now you don't.) And somehow the rotted yellowed teeth get cleaned up and capped somewhere between the recantation and the scaffold. But it would do a disservice to insinuate that The Crucible is as bad and as fun as that fellow Puritan-basher, The Scarlet Letter. It's only as bad. With Winona Ryder, Bruce Davison, Jeffrey Jones. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd