Of Mice and Men is a pretty bleak film set in Depression-era California. It’s based upon the novel by John Steinbeck, and if you’re expecting a happy experience, you’ve clearly never read one of Steinbeck’s books from that era. Two migrant workers keep moving from one job to another, and it’s a tough existence, particularly since one of them suffered a brain injury as a child and cannot fully comprehend most of what people say to him. However, he’s astonishingly strong and a hard worker who listens to and does whatever his friend tells him to do.
The two friends are George (played by Burgess Meredith) and Lennie (Lon Chaney Jr.), and they’ve been together for years. I think I heard George say they were cousins at one point early in the film, but that still doesn’t stop the questioning from everyone about why the two of them are together. It’s pretty simple, though. Lennie needs someone to keep him from using his brute strength to harm someone or something. At the start of the film, the two of them are escaping from Weed because Lennie did some act that upset the townspeople. We’re never told exactly what happened, but we start to imagine what it could be.
We quickly get introduced to a host of characters that will play important parts in the narrative. Curley and his new wife, for example, will keep getting involved in George and Lennie’s lives. Curley (Bob Steele) is the son of the owner of the barley farm the two men show up at. Curley is jealous of any attention his wife gets, and he’s quite hot-tempered, seemingly always up for a fight. His wife (Betty Field, fascinating in a small role) is bored and, to be fair, a bit of a tramp. She wants to see other people, to get out of the house from time to time, but Curley keeps leaving her alone to hang out in the nearby town with other men and, presumably, other women. Make of that sentence what you will.
Charles Bickford plays Slim, the most experienced and knowledgeable hand on the farm and someone who takes little guff from Curley. Roman Bohnen plays Candy, a farm worker who lost his hand in an accident and hangs around doing little odd jobs. He has an older dog that the other workers object to because it’s gotten weak and rather smelly. One of the first terrible incidents in the film is when several of the men convince Candy to let them kill the old dog and he would get a new puppy from Slim (like Curley’s wife has done). You can see from Bohnen’s face just how much it breaks Candy’s heart to let them kill his dog. It’s a tough moment in the film, one that will resonate all the way through until the ending.
Georgy and Lennie have a plan to earn enough money to buy a farm, a place where they can escape the constant difficulty of being someone else’s worker. Lennie will get to raise some rabbits, and he never stops talking about the rabbits. He really, really gets excited about them. That’s how Candy finds out about the farm and asks if he can join them. He has a lot of money, probably from being paid off after losing his hand on the job. Even Crooks, an African American farmhand who isn’t allowed to sleep in the bunkhouse with the rest of the men, asks to join them on the farm. It’s clearly meant as a representation of the American Dream, and it’s interesting to see that the downtrodden, the disabled, and the marginalized are the ones most invested in trying to escape their current situation and achieve that dream.
A series of misunderstandings leads Curley to attack Lennie, and the larger man breaks Curley’s hand even though he was just trying to stop the temperamental Curley from continuing to hit him. Lennie just cannot control himself; he doesn’t understand how strong he is and how dangerous he is as a consequence. Chaney was dismissed as a character actor and later as a horror film actor, but he’s very effective here. He is more expert at conveying someone with the lingering effects of a brain injury that a lot of other actors could muster.
The acting overall is particularly first rate. Several of the cast members came from the original Broadway production of the play adapted from Steinbeck’s novel, including Leigh Whipper who played Crooks and then went on to have a long career in Hollywood. Bohnen was also a stage actor, but he embodies Candy in a very naturalistic way here. Meredith had already performed in a few films, and Chaney had more than fifty film credits by the time he was cast as Lennie. Field was starring in just her second film here, but she brings a fitting sense of world-weariness to the role. She makes quite an impression in the few key scenes she has in the film.
It’s a sequence between Chaney and Field that serves as the climactic moment of the film. Curley has kicked his wife out of the house, so she goes to the barn to get the puppy that Slim gave her. She discovers Lennie there, sad because he’s accidentally killed his puppy by petting it too hard. Field makes the most of this scene, giving quite the monologue about how she wound up with Curley and how she’s going to Hollywood to be discovered. Lennie, of course, doesn’t follow most of this. He just keeps repeating the same lines, which prompts the rather low-class, rough woman to call him “goofy.”
Lennie talks about how much he likes soft things, perhaps the fur of the puppy or the fur of a rabbit, as examples. She talks about how soft her hair is and asks him to touch it to feel for himself. He hurts her because he doesn’t realize how strong he is and winds up killing her by accident. It’s a tragic moment in the film because we realize rather quickly that Lennie and George will have to leave again and keep looking for a new place.
When George and Candy discover the body, it doesn’t take long for the rest of the men on the farm to show up and figure out that Lennie is to blame. They form a search party, and it’s a race to see who can find Lennie first. This final sequence really allows Meredith to shine. He demonstrates the heaviness of the burden he’s been carrying trying to look out for Lennie all these years. It’s quite exhausting, so when he reaches a fatal decision that harkens back to an earlier scene in the film, the audience might be horrified, of course, but they will fully comprehend why he takes the action that he does. Meredith had a long and distinguished career in film, and this early role demonstrates how suited he was to the medium.
I don’t always talk about musical scores for dramatic films because, to a degree, they’re meant to serve as background music. However, Of Mice and Men features a marvelous original score by the great American composer Aaron Copland. This was only three years before he completed “Fanfare for the Common Man” and just five years before “Appalachian Spring,” two of his masterpieces. It’s tough to watch the film and not pay careful attention to the music that underscores the dramatic tension.
Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Production, Best Sound Recording, Best Scoring, and Best Original Score
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