March 1, 2003
By ANITA GATES, New York Times

Ah, the simple pleasures of 17th-century Puritan life! Doing birdcalls for your girlfriend while she rinses laundry in the stream. Collecting eggs in the henhouse. Gathering with neighbors to torment sinners as they're driven out of town naked.
That's the gifted Henry Czerny as the village's robust minister, rushing into the square to batter the sinners with a few more words of religious invective, in "Salem Witch Trials," a two-part CBS film that begins tomorrow night and concludes on Tuesday night. Mr. Czerny obviously has a special talent for playing evil clergymen; he was chillingly good as a sexually abusive priest in the Canadian film "The Boys of St. Vincent," and he is outstanding here as the Rev. Samuel Parris.
Just when you think Parris is about to do something humane, he turns around and again demonstrates his appetite for cruelty. This is a true fire-and-brimstone preacher, the ideal Puritan to fan the flames of mass hysteria when his small-town congregation decides, based on a few children's organized mischief, that it's under mass attack by witches.
"Salem Witch Trials" has quite a distinguished cast, not that that's any guarantee of quality. (Maybe you remember Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith in "Clash of the Titans.") But in this case the production is almost good enough for the players. Alan Bates plays the grand new governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony; Peter Ustinov plays the deposed governor, who is given the witchcraft crisis in Salem Village as a special project; and Shirley MacLaine appears as Rebecca Nurse, a soft-spoken, placidly pious church member who is eventually accused of witchcraft herself. But then, isn't everybody?
What most Americans know about the 1692 trials, in which at least 19 innocent people were put to death (most of them hanged while their neighbors looked on), probably comes from Arthur Miller's 1953 play "The Crucible." Mr. Miller's play, which was made into a 1996 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Joan Allen and had a Broadway revival last year with Liam Neeson and Laura Linney, was viewed as a metaphor for the so-called witch hunts for Communists led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the 1950's. In 2003 it's easier to take the events at face value. In the tradition of so many network movies, "Salem Witch Trials" is, as they say, based on true events.
This time the story is told largely from the viewpoint of the accusers rather than the accused. In recent interpretations, the whole mess started because John Proctor had a fling with the family baby sitter, Abigail Williams, and Abigail accused his wife, Elizabeth, of witchcraft as revenge for his ending the affair. The real Abigail, played by the completely grown-up Winona Ryder in the film, was actually 11. Then the Putnam family, who had had disputes with the Proctors, jumped on the bandwagon.
In this film the Proctors are minor characters. Kirstie Alley plays Ann Putnam, who in an early scene gives birth to a dead son. This is her third stillborn, and she is so distraught that she begins to suspect that dark forces are working against her - or that she has offended God.
It is her daughter, Annie (Katie Boland), who starts the witch-accusing ball rolling, and her motivations aren't seen as the raging hormones of puberty. On the contrary, she is ready to turn her back on womanhood after having observed her mother's intense pain in childbirth and then having seen her mother creepily holding and kissing her dead baby (who looks somewhere between animatronic and F. A. O. Schwarz). When the boy Annie likes is seen flirting with another girl, that's enough for her to start viewing a lot of things as sinful. Before long, she and a gaggle of other girls are fainting, having seizures, screaming in terror, making animal noises and lapsing into something like catatonia whenever anyone suspects they're faking.
You'll see more convincing hysteria on the daytime talk shows; the director, Joseph Sargent, should probably have shown the young actresses film of fans at early Beatles concerts for inspiration. Maria Nation's solid, lively screenplay uses period dialogue smoothly but occasionally hits a consistency glitch. I could swear Ann tells a neighbor, "I promise you, ye shall be sorry."
Jay O. Sanders plays Ann's husband, an appropriately vengeful, self-centered and unlikable Thomas Putnam. Rebecca De Mornay, almost unrecognizable in her white Puritan cap, is a voice of reason as the Rev. Mr. Parris's frail but clearheaded wife, who knows when it's time to get out of town. Gloria Reuben is particularly sympathetic as Tituba, the Parrises' slave.
The only winners in the hysteria were the girls themselves, and that was only temporary. For a while they received more attention and respect than children of almost any era could hope for. In fact, the girls soon went on tour, visiting other towns and villages to identify the witches in their midst. They found 60 in Andover alone.

Joseph Sargent, director; Maria Nation, writer; John Ryan, producer; Pierre Gill, director of photography; Debra Karen, editor; Ed Gernon, Peter Sussman and Paula Weinstein, executive producers. A production of Alliance Atlantis with Spring Creek Productions.

WITH: Kirstie Alley (Ann Putnam), Henry Czerny (the Rev. Samuel Parris), Gloria Reuben (Tituba), Jay O. Sanders (Thomas Putnam), Kristin Booth (Lizzie Porter), Katie Boland (Annie Putnam), Alan Bates (Sir William Phips), Rebecca De Mornay (Elizabeth Parris), Peter Ustinov (William Stoughton), Shirley MacLaine (Rebecca Nurse) and Katie Boland (Annie Putnam).

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company