Well-made version of a story that has since become almost excessively familiar

Director: Lewis Milestone

Cast: Burgess Meredith (George), Lon Chaney Jnr (Lennie), Betty Field (Mae), Charles Bickford (Slim), Roman Bohnen (Candy), Bob Steele (Curley), Noah Beery Jnr (Whit), Oscar O’Shea (Jackson), Granville Bates (Carlson), Leigh Whipper (Crooks), Helen Lynd (Susie)

I suspect John Steinbecks’s powerful parable has been rather defanged for many people, after extensive over-exposure in schools across the world. Who hasn’t spent hours in an English class pouring over the struggles and dreams of permanently unlucky Depression-era drifters, scrawny George and muscular-but-childlike Lenny? It’s hard to not feel Of Mice and Men is very familiar the second the credits roll on Milestone’s film – or fail to notice some of its on-the-nose musings (sometimes the kindest thing you can do is kill a frightened, vulnerable dog, rather than let it suffer – I wonder what development plot is being alluded too here…) and while familiarity has stripped Of Mice and Men of some of its power, this is an effective, well-made, version.

George (Burgess Meredith) is the brains of a partnership with childlike muscle man Lenny (Lon Chaney Jnr) as they drift from job-to-job out West, constantly hired on the back of Lenny’s muscle, then escaping from the troubles his lack of understanding of the world causes, through George’s survivalist cunning. They dream of having their own place – and they get a shot at it when aged, one-handed farmhand Candy (Roman Bohnen) offers to chuck his accident-payout dollars into their pot. But Lenny’s inability to cope with the world keeps leading to danger: from his accidental rousing of the ire of small-of-statue rancher’s son Curley (Bob Steele) to his fascination with Curley’s pretty wife Mae (Betty Field). Some dreams are doomed.

Of Mice and Men stays very faithful to Steinbeck, playing out this smalltown tragedy under the low-key, persuasive eye of Milestone who avoids either overplaying the tear-jerking or smothering the story with flashy film-making (there is one dramatic pull-back after disaster strikes, and George flees a barn, the camera heading into a sudden wide-angle, but other than that this is restrained film-making). Instead, the focus is very much placed on the relationship between two very different men who, without even quite understanding it, are mutually dependent halves of a whole.

At first it seems George and Lenny are effectively in a marriage of convenience. The wirey George would struggle to be hired without the loaded-cart lifting Lenny as a sweetener, while Lenny can barely tie his own shoelaces without George’s guidance. Meredith’s snipy, wheedling George feels at first like he can only just master his frustration with Chaney Jnr’s lumberingly sweet Lenny. But Meredith gives full life to a character who, we slowly realise, has a brotherly protective regard for Lenny – and needs the purpose Lenny gives his life, just as much as they both need the reassurance of George’s constantly spun story of their dream farm. This mantra – with Lenny echoing lines like a child’s bedtime story – of the buildings and animals they’ll care for is delivered by Meredith with a careful repetition that constantly flowers into earnest true-belief. We realise George is as much a lost soul as Lenny, adrift and barely able to cope with the world.

Because Depression-era America is a place where dreams go to die. Curley, clutching a few hundred dollars hush money after a farming accident cost him his hand, knows his life is just a countdown until he is kicked off the farm for being unable to work. He’s facing a future not too dissimilar from his euthanised dog, eyed up by the other men as a feeble old-timer who’d be better off snuffing it. No wonder both he and the simple Lenny, living on the bottom rung of life’s ladder, find a companionship with segregated Black farmhand Crooks (a very sensitive performance from Leigh Whipper, a character treated respectfully by Milestone’s film).

George’s natural alliance is with these little guys. Meredith’s George is naïve in his own way, slightly off-the-pace in social situations, tolerated by others, a deep vein of anxiety and worry just under his skin that he is all-too-happy to repress while he focuses on being father-figure and big-brother to Lenny. Meredith makes him chippy but not quite as worldly as he thinks, shrewd but vulnerable and, for all his carefully performance self-confidence, insecure and intimidated by events. He’s a passenger in life who likes to kid himself he’s a driver.

Authority lies elsewhere. Curley, played with a little-man anger and stunted swagger by Bob Steele, makes up for his own (many) insecurities – about everything from his height to what his flirtatious wife gets up to – by treating everyone below him in the farm’s pecking order with contempt. Curley needs to proof his masculinity by beating Lenny – who has all the physical gifts he longs for but none of the gumption to use them. He can only dream of having the relaxed, natural authority of Charles Bickford’s Slim, a man completely confident about himself and his standing in life – this easy assurance stands out in a film full of the jittery, frightened and insecure.

Of Mice and Men’s weakness, as with the book (as even Steinbeck later acknowledged) is Curley’s wife. Betty – played with a shrill energy by Betty Field in a performance she’s not quite strong enough to pull off – is only faintly crafted into a vaguely three-dimensional figure from the sexually charged, selfish flirt she is in the book. Here she has moments of self-reflection – and Milestone’s film briefly explores the isolation of this girl who dreamed of Hollywood but ended up married to an inadequate, angry man on a crappy farm – but remains, at heart, a brassy, selfish woman who precipitates disaster through her actions. It’s a singular lack of empathy in a film that prides itself on its humanitarianism.

Disaster is the inevitable outcome of a Steinbeck Depression-era drama. Milestone’s film finds quiet emotional power – aided a great deal by both Meredith and Chaney Jnr effectively under-playing – in the film’s final moments. You can imagine if this was your first exposure to a very familiar story, being impressed by the effectiveness of so much here. This is particularly so in the film’s powerful ending, directed with admirable restraint and played with a highly effective (and underplayed) emotion by Meredith. If other parts of the film are more well-assembled than really inspired, delivering Steinbeck pretty much as it is on the tin, that still makes for a fine version of a now familiar tale.