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A comparison of serious American fiction and film reveals that John Steinbeck has proved the most cinematically adaptable of our major novelists. At least two great films have been adapted from Steinbeck's fiction-Lewis Milestone's Of Mice and Men (1939) and John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940)-While two other films-Milestone's The Red Pony (1949) and Elia Kazan's East of Eden (1955)-are at least very good.1 It can be demonstrated that Steinbeck's novels possess qualities which make them inherently adaptable for the screen; his individualized characters, strong narrative lines, and colorful settings are all as valuable in the film as they are in fiction. Yet more subtle considerations of style, mode, and medium yield greater insights into the filmic adaptability of Steinbeck's fiction, particularly when attention is focused on the chronological pattern of these adaptations. The two great films were made from Steinbeck's most realistic novels at the high point of American cinematic realism in the years just prior to World War Two; thus the convergence of literary and cinematic mode and style occasioned the successful screen adaptions of Steinbeck's fiction to the film medium. This paper will consider the styles of fictional and filmic realism as exemplified in Steinbeck's and Milestone's Of Mice and Men in order to elucidate both works, and to extend critical discussion of literary and cinematic styles.
None of the scholarship on film realism has utilized the recent work on American fictional Realism which rejects the traditional simplifications about common matter, liberal ideas, and journalistic style as characteristic of the mode, and substitutes definitions based on the stylistic devices of Realism. In particular, the works of George Becker, Donald Pizer, and Harold Kolb on American literary Realism have created new criteria which render earlier generalizations about Realism suspect as untested clichés.2 For example, Professor Kolb proceeds to define the mode of Realism by topical, but not necessarily "ordinary" matter, by an ethical and liberal, though unidealized, philosophical overview, and by a characteristic style. This Realistic style is marked by anti-omniscience, by complexity and ambiguity, by concern for character over action, and imagery over symbolism.
Although he does not mention Steinbeck specifically, Professor Kolb's definitions obviously describe in a general sense the matter, the manner, and the method employed in Of Mice...