Milestone's Of Mice and Men has a lot going for it: veteran Norbert Brodine's beautiful black-and-white cinematography; Aaron Copeland's effective score; superb acting, particularly leads Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr.; and Eugene Solow's script, which fairly closely follows John Steinbeck's novella and the play based on it. Andrew Sarris described Milestone as "a formalist of the Left" and the film is sympathetic to the farmworkers it depicts and their relationship to the farm owner -- though little of the farmwork, "bucking barley," is shown -- with the emphasis on the workers and their dreams. But everyone's dream is thwarted, including the owner's daughter-in-law (Betty Field), who only married in order to get away from the farm and is accidentally killed by Lennie (Chaney), who suffers from mental illness and is protected by George (Meredith), as they both dream of getting a farm of their own.
Milestone portrays a rotten system well but it is unclear how he himself feels about it and whether he thinks anything can be done; in the same way he seems to criticize war in All Quiet on the Western Front, another technically impressive film, and later took an opposite view of war in the pro-Soviet The North Star (1943). I don't deny some of Milstone's films are impressive -- though I prefer films with a stronger point of view by the director -- and he does an excellent job with the actors in Of Mice and Men, including Leigh Whipper, an African-American actor whose character is treated with great dignity at a time when that was rare in Hollywood.
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