In all the troubled history of Salem, was there ever an event like this? How did the young girls, so carefully protected, slip from their homes? How did they come to be so uninhibited, in a Puritan society, that they could dance naked together? In a movie that will be about false accusations of witchcraft, this is an ominous beginning if it looks like witchcraft, sounds like witchcraft and smells like witchcraft, then can it possibly be an innocent frolic of high-spirited young teenagers? This scene was offstage, wisely, in the original 1952 stage production of Arthur Miller's “The Crucible.” To show it in this new film version is a mistake, because the play is not about literal misbehavior but about imagined transgressions what one imagines a witch does is infinitely more stimulating and troubling than this child's play. By the light of a full moon, a minister happens upon a group of adolescent girls, naked, dancing in the forest around a boiling pot of witches' brew. The first scene in “The Crucible” strikes the first wrong note.

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