(December 6, 1937)

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, like the best seller it faithfully follows, takes a squinty look at life among the bindle stiffs, reports out of the side of its mouth in short, hair-raising words. A soundly written, expertly produced play, its close-knit suspense timed to the last held breath, it seemed fated by first-nighters' extraordinary enthusiasm to extraordinary success. Some partisans, reading between its hard-bitten lines a sweeping social preachment, freely prophesied that it would win the Pulitzer Prize. Even those who saw in it only a macabre fold-melodrama applauded the play's outspokenness and sincerity.

The play shows the strange, tragic comradeship of Lennie, a huge, fetish-bound dullard whose innocent pleasure was to pet small, furry things, whose vice was his crazy strength that inevitably killed the things he loved to touch; and George, a wiry, roadwise nomad whose chief job in life was looking after Lennie. The hopeless fairy tale that George (Wallace Ford) tells Lennie (Broderick Crawford) over and over about the little house on the little piece o'land, with an affairs patch and rabbits for Lennie to pet, where one day they will live "off the fatta the land" was more than a bedtime story. It was George's dream, and the dream of every wandering ranch hand who reaps the planting of others, collects his fifty a month, moves on to other planters' harvests. Then Lennie, without meaning to, kills the boss's son's wife and George mercifully shoots him before the lynchers get there.

The fate of the play lay in the hands of young, Broderick Crawford, 210-lb. ex-football player, son of Comedienne Helen Broderick. Built up into a hulking, shuffling imbecile by means of four-inch shoes and padded shoulders. Crawford won sympathy for a monstrous character, playing Lennie as a pathetic giant who kills as innocently as an unintentionally offending child.