A Film Canon

This close, powerful adaptation of John Steinbeck's classic novella-play outlines a hierarchy of devotion - from the demeaning love of man for woman, to the redeeming love of man for man, itself a particular instance of the more universal love of man for dog, which is, in turn, subsumed into the all-pervasive love of man for earth. Conversely, the alienation of Depression migrant labourers from the properties upon which they work becomes indistinguishable from their need to talk, until, driven "crazy with loneliness for land", every living thing is imbued with the significance of a companion, and every death takes on a traumatic magnitude, comparable to that awaiting the field mouse from which Steinbeck derived his title. From this perspective, George Milton's (Burgess Meredith) and Lennie Smalls' (Lon Chaney Jr., in an inspired piece of casting) dream of a house of their own is little more than a return to the original modesty of the American Dream, its consumerist, extravagant counterpart identified with the deceptive lure of Hollywood. Hence the egalitarianism of the community for which that house comes to stand - white men, negroes, the physically and intellectually handicapped - as well as the increasingly beatific terms within which it is couched, which nevertheless fail to produce an optimistically expansive aesthetic. Even the occasional, rapid pan simply dwarfs the characters in a medium that is more temporal than spatial, relegating their dreams to the distant past, and inculcating widespread memory loss: "I worked weeks all of my life...I don't remember none of them."