Production
Jean-Paul Sartre began writing the script in late 1955, during what author David Caute defined as "the height of his rapprochement with the Soviet Union". He was inspired by the success of Marcel Aymé's French-language adaptation of Miller's The Crucible, titled Les sorcières de Salem, which was staged in Paris' Sarah Bernhardt Theater, starring Simone Signoret as Elizabeth Proctor. Sartre later said he was moved to write his adaptation because "the play showed John Proctor persecuted, but no one knows why... His death seems like a purely ethical act, rather than one of freedom, that is undertaken in order to resist the situation effectively. In Miller's play... Each of us can see what he wants, each public will find in it confirmation of its own attitude... Because the real political and social implications of the witch-hunt don't appear clearly." The screenplay was 300 pages long. Sartre's version was different from the original play in many ways; Elizabeth saves Abigail from lynching and the townspeople rise up against Thomas Danforth, who becomes the chief antagonist.
The film was one of four major Franco-East German co-productions made during the late 1950s - the others were Till Ulenspiegel's Adventures, Les Misérables and Les Arrivistes. The Democratic Republic's government authorized the DEFA studio to collaborate with companies outside the Eastern Bloc in order to gain access to Western audiences, thus bypassing the limitations imposed by West Germany's Hallstein Doctrine; eventually, they intended their films to reach also the public in the Federal Republic. The French, on their part, were interested in reducing costs by filming in East Germany. Principal photography took place in DEFA's Babelsberg Studios from August to mid-October 1956, with additional shooting in Paris during early November.
Read more about this topic: The Crucible (1957 Film)
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“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)