Film on Ernest Hemingway Fails to Mention Steinbeck

April 17, 2021 by 5 Comments

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It was a slog at times, and Ernest Hemingway the man repeatedly came off as a really unlikable jerk, but I made it through Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s Hemingway fest on PBS. Boy, was Hemingway a strange, mean, and multi-troubled soul. By comparison, he makes John Steinbeck’s grumpy persona look saintly.

There are interesting parallels between Hemingway and Steinbeck, though, especially their struggles with booze/drugs, their need to prove their manhood in war, and their rocky marriages and fatherhood failings. They were also equally terrified of speaking in public or on TV. Hemingway’s fame and influence surpassed Steinbeck’s and every other writer before and after World War II. But it was odd that Novick and Burns never mentioned Steinbeck at all.

Scott Fitzgerald had a few cameos. The name John Dos Passos was dropped. But you would have thought Hemingway was the only important American novelist alive after 1938.

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Hemingway’s Action “Unnecessarily Cruel and Stupid”

Burns could have slipped Steinbeck into the program—and provided a redundant example of what an ass Hemingway was—by mentioning the only meeting between the two literary heavyweights. As Jackson Benson describes it in his biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Hemingway expressed the wish to meet Steinbeck in the spring of 1944 when they were both in New York City.

It must have been quite an event. The dinner party at Tim Costello’s on Third Avenue took weeks to arrange, was attended by Robert Capa (at left in World War II photo with Army driver and Hemingway, right), John O’Hara, and John Hersey and—says Benson—turned out to be pretty much a disaster. The only memorable incident was when Hemingway and O’Hara were at the bar arguing over the authenticity of the old blackthorn walking stick Steinbeck had given O’Hara. As Benson tells the story, to prove that the walking stick—which had been handed down to Steinbeck by his grandfather—was not the real deal, Hemingway bet O’Hara 50 bucks he could break it over his head.

“O’Hara accepted,” Benson writes. “Hemingway took the stick by both ends and pulled it down over his head, breaking it in two. ‘You call that a blackthorn?’ he said, and threw the pieces aside. O’Hara was mortified, while Steinbeck . . . looked on and thought the whole thing was unnecessarily cruel and stupid.”

Benson says Steinbeck admired Hemingway more than any other writer of his time. But it was Hemingway’s writing skills Steinbeck admired, not his creepy he-man personality. Based on Burns and Novick’s six-hour biography, Steinbeck had it right.

Ken Burns received the 2013 John Steinbeck award for humanitarian achievement given by the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. Michael Katakis—a consultant and major contributor to the Hemingway film—is an essayist, fiction writer, and photographer who divides his time between Paris, London, and Carmel, California. Bill Steigerwald recently released the e-book version of his book on Ray Sprigle, which includes the original 21-part series reporter Sprigle wrote about his undercover journalism mission in the Jim Crow South in 1948.—Ed.

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TV Tour of John Steinbeck’s USA Free Courtesy of Europe

February 1, 2019 by 2 Comments

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John Steinbeck said in 1961 that he wrote Travels with Charley because he’d been in Europe so long he’d lost touch, and sympathy, with America. As shown by John Steinbeck’s USA—the Great Literary Tour series documentary available through April 29 on ARTE TV—America is looking stranger than ever to Europeans in 2019. A Franco-German venture with EU funding, ARTE (Association relative à la télévision européenne) provides serious cultural programming free, without commercials, online and on European television. Narrated in German with English subtitles that probably didn’t mean to be funny, John Steinbeck’s USA combines rare archival footage with interviews, commentary, and video filmed at a variety of venues—a hard shell Baptist church in Brunswick, Vermont; a gun-happy hunter’s house in Deer Isle, Maine; a trailer park home in Middle America—that sync with Steinbeck’s schedule in Travels with Charley. True to the sense and sensibility of Steinbeck’s semi-fictive classic, it’s one literary tour for Europeans that no American with Steinbeck’s anxiety about America’s future should miss.

Video image from John Steinbeck’s USA courtesy ARTE TV

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Trump Relief: Bill Hader’s Riff on Of Mice and Men

August 3, 2018 by 1 Comment

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It’s a shame John Steinbeck didn’t live to see Saturday Night Live. The author of Of Mice and Men died in December 1968, six weeks after Richard Nixon was elected President; SNL debuted in 1975, fourteen months after Nixon resigned in disgrace. Much about Nixon’s America depressed Steinbeck, including Nixon’s party, but he kept his sense of humor and he understood the medium of television, Nixon’s undoing against Kennedy in 1960. If Steinbeck had lived longer he might have enjoyed SNL’s blend of comic relief and left-leaning satire, given his preference for politicians like Kennedy and Stevenson, the witty Democrat from Illinois defeated by Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Steinbeck critiqued Eisenhower’s thought (conventional), syntax (chaotic), and reading (cowboy fiction), so it’s easy to predict his reaction today to a worse-than-Eisenhower type like Donald Trump, or Rick Perry—brilliantly impersonated by Bill Hader, riffing on Of Mice and Men in this SNL sketch about the 2012 Republican candidate debate at which the man Trump made Secretary of Energy couldn’t remember the name of the federal department he now heads. If you need comic relief from Trump-induced depression, watch Bill Hader’s Rick Perry channel Lennie, with Mitt Romney as George at his side. Imagine John Steinbeck at your side and you’ll both die laughing.

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Parallels Meet: Steinbeck, Moberg, and Two Migrations

June 7, 2018 by 10 Comments

Images from Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Steve Hauk, the author of Steinbeck: The Untold Stories, contributed to this account of an overlooked aspect of John Steinbeck’s life, writing, and reputation as a 20th century American internationalist: his association with the Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg, with whom he shared political sympathies, geographical proximity, and personal traits, including depression.—Ed. 

John Steinbeck and Vilhelm Moberg had more in common than literary greatness. Sensitive to the humble, powerless, and downtrodden, both writers documented social injustice with abiding sympathy and convincing clarity in works of fiction that became classics. Both wrote novelistic sagas of human migration that became major movies—Steinbeck’s 1930s protest novel The Grapes of Wrath and The Emigrants, the series of four novels in Swedish written by Moberg and made into a pair of feature films starring Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow in the 1970s. Both men did some of their best writing on California’s Monterey Peninsula, though at different times, and may have met there in the late 1940s. “In one of his letters home, Moberg mentions having met Steinbeck,” notes Swedish scholar Jens Liljestrand, who speculates that the meeting must have been “brief and superficial,” given the barriers of language, age, and demeanor that separated them.

Both men did some of their best writing on California’s Monterey Peninsula, though at different times, and may have met there in the late 1940s.

Steinbeck died in 1968 at 66, and Moberg, who was born in 1898, committed suicide in 1973. But one thing is certain. If they were alive today both men would be deeply disturbed by the global refugee crisis and the resurgent nativism that has nurtured anti-immigration movements in Sweden, the United States, and across Europe. While Steinbeck focused on a family of Oklahoma tenant farmers driven west by natural catastrophe and Depression economics, Moberg followed a family of Swedish farmers who abandon the stony soil of Smaland in the 1800s for the promised land of rural Minnesota. Both took sides in parallel stories of epic struggle—for survival, dignity, and a place to call home. In each case, the dream of land and domicile motivated migration across states or seas by displaced souls, described most poignantly in the African American spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.”

Both took sides in parallel stories of epic struggle—for survival, dignity, and a place to call home.

When Vilhelm Moberg came to California in 1948, the Monterey Peninsula was about to face its own disaster—the depletion of the sardine population through over-fishing predicted by John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, who died the year Moberg arrived. Gustaf Lannestock, a Swede who had worked as a masseur at the Hotel Del Monte and moved to Carmel, met Moberg walking on the beach and became his friend and translator. In 1998, the late Monterey County Herald columnist Bonnie Gartshore described the fateful encounter: “One day in 1948, Vilhelm Moberg, Sweden’s foremost novelist, took a rest from writing “Utvandrana” (“The Emigrants”). He had come to the Monterey Peninsula after long months of research to write the book, first of a [quartet] about Swedish families . . . in the 1800s. One way of relaxing after intense writing stints was to plunge into the surf at Carmel Beach.’’

Moberg came to the Monterey Peninsula to write a book about Swedish families in the 1800s.

When Steinbeck lived in Pacific Grove in the 1930s he sought relief in the same fashion, exploring the tide pools with his friend Ricketts and gaining a sense of proportion. Lannestock and his wife Lucile enjoyed Swedish-style entertaining and their home attracted a party crowd, described by Liljestrand as the “cultural elite in Carmel,” that included Ricketts—who wrote of his friendship with Lannestock—and Steinbeck, as well as Robinson Jeffers. But according to Moberg, notes Liljestrand, the Lannestocks “didn’t socialize much with Steinbeck” because “they took his estranged wife’s side” when the Steinbecks moved to Los Gatos and their marriage collapsed. Steinbeck’s career eventually took him to Hollywood, Mexico, and Manhattan. He completed East of Eden, the California saga of his mother’s Irish-immigrant farm family, in New York. Moberg—who based his quartet of Swedish emigrant novels on the diaries of a Minnesota farmer—had finished the first two (shown here) in Carmel by 1952, the year East of Eden appeared.

Image of Vilhelm Moberg, author of The Emigrants

When war came, neither Moberg nor Steinbeck was afraid to speak out. Moberg was openly critical of Sweden’s attempt at neutrality, and his 1941 novel Ride This Night, though set in the 17th century, is clearly a commentary on Nazi aggression. Steinbeck’s 1942 novella The Moon Is Down is about the invasion of an unnamed town in Scandinavia by an unnamed army that is unmistakably German. The book was outlawed in occupied Sweden, where Steinbeck had friends, but contraband copies were passed by hand and Steinbeck’s contribution to European morale was cited when he received the Nobel Prize from the Swedish Academy. The Steinbeck-Moberg connection can also be seen in Arvid and Robert, characters in The New Land who, as the film critic Terrence Rafferty observed, “have come to resemble Lennie and George, the wanderers of John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’” in the 1972 motion picture adaptation of the second novel in Moberg’s emigrant series. The movie’s director was Jan Troell, a Swede who shared Steinbeck and Moberg’s vision of the emigrant experience—and who came to the Monterey Peninsula in 1974 to shoot Zandy’s Bride, also starring Liv Ullman.

When war came, neither Moberg nor Steinbeck was afraid to speak out.

Swedes are supposed to be solitary types who wait for others to break the ice, a function frequently served by friends like Lannestock and Ricketts, Moberg’s likely entrée to Steinbeck’s world. “According to Lannestock’s memoir,” notes Liljestrand, “Moberg’s English wasn’t very good. He mostly hung out with just the Lannestocks, with whom he spoke Swedish.” If Bonnie Gartshore is correct, Moberg made his way despite that obstacle. In Monterey, she says, “he enjoyed talking to Sicilian Fishermen whom he met on Fisherman’s Wharf, and he wrote an article about them for a Stockholm newspaper.” Devastated by the death of Ricketts and a second failed marriage, Steinbeck returned to Pacific Grove in 1949 to recover. Given their habit of taking walks, a meeting with Moberg could have occurred by accident. Given their reticence, it might have needed help.

Lannestock and Ricketts were Moberg’s likely entrée to Steinbeck’s world.

Like Steinbeck, Moberg enjoys an enduring reputation in the homeland he both criticized and celebrated in his writing. His novels are required reading in Sweden, where he’s revered as a journalist, historian, and playwright with more than two dozen dramas to his credit. Also like Steinbeck, he experimented with literary forms. Steinbeck will always be associated with Okie migration and intercalary structure for The Grapes of Wrath. The author who called The Emigrants series his “documentary novels” became synonymous with Swedish immigration to the United States. Neither writer was satisfied by the celebrity. In a letter to Toby Street, Steinbeck talked about “a longing for extinction” caused by the conviction he “had no home, never did”—cruelly ironic from one who, like Moberg, wrote so memorably of people searching for a home.

Neither Steinbeck nor Moberg was satisfied by the celebrity they achieved.

Like Steinbeck, Moberg suffered from depression that grew worse with age. A radical democrat and political contrarian, he continued to speak out against monarchy, bureaucracy, and public corruption after he returned to Sweden. But he experienced writer’s block and his melancholy became despair. Early one morning in 1973 he left a letter of apology for his wife and drowned himself. “The time is twenty past seven; I go to search in the lake for eternal sleep. Forgive me, I could not endure,” he wrote her. He is frequently paired with his fellow Scandinavian O.E. Rolvaag, the author of Giants in the Earth. But he had much in common with his fellow Californian, John Steinbeck. The connection is overlooked, but it extended to war, depression, and epic protest against epic injustice. In light of current events, it’s worth remembering.

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Library in The Public Recalls Steinbeck’s Greatest Book

February 5, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Image of 2018 Santa Barbara Film Festival opening night poster

Cain and Abel. Charles and Adam. Cal and Aron. The actor Emilio Estevez and his brother, the actor Charlie Sheen, have the kind of sibling rivalry that John Steinbeck rendered as a curse and an example in East of Eden. So it’s fitting that Emilio Estevez—the Abel in the Sheen family picture—drew inspiration from The Grapes of Wrath when he wrote and directed The Public, the socially conscious feature film in which he also performs, along with Christian Slater, Jena Malone, and Alec Baldwin, another actor with a brother who can be difficult. Set in Cincinnati and released in time for the gala opening of the Santa Barbara Film Festival last week, The Public is about a group of homeless patrons who refuse to leave the library when a cold front fills emergency shelters and makes returning to the streets a deadly proposition. An appreciative review of the movie at Edhat Santa Barbara notes that The Grapes of Wrath “figures prominently as a thematic and quotation reference” and that “the library in itself becomes a character—it disperses information, yet also is full of great works of literature that [ask] us to ponder life, morality, and meaning.” Like food and shelter, keeping the public in public library is a life-and-death matter for such book-minded observers of events as Emilio Estevez—Abel-types who view policemen beating up protestors in cities like Cincinnati as the spiritual sons of Cain-types from places like Salinas and Bakersfield, the bullies with badges who brutalized migrants living in boxes on the outskirts of town and burned The Grapes of Wrath in front of the library when John Steinbeck protested their actions in his greatest book.

 

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John Steinbeck in Jeopardy?

February 2, 2018 by 2 Comments

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What does it mean when John Steinbeck is the category but contestants on Jeopardy! don’t know the answers? That was the $64,000 question raised by a recent episode of “America’s favorite quiz show,” hosted since 1984 by Alex Trebek. The quiz show scandals of the 1950s bothered Steinbeck so badly that he used game show rigging as an example of American decline in The Winter of Our Discontent. But the final round questions on December 14, 2017 were about the novels by Steinbeck that had been made into movies, and it was clear from their answers that the contestants on this show hadn’t been coached. All guys and all under 40, they batted their way through sports, food, weather, world facts, and things called David, then stumbled and choked on characters from books by Steinbeck, with slow recall on The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men and no recall at all of The Red Pony, Cannery Row, or East of Eden. As David Wrobel notes, “it’s a nice confirmation of how deeply embedded Steinbeck is in American culture” when he’s a game show category. It’s less inspiring when the contestants can’t answer the questions. (Skip to 8 in the video to view the final round.)

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New USA Network Drama Channels John Steinbeck

November 6, 2017 by Leave a Comment

Image from Damnation, USA Network dramatic series

The principal writer and executive producer of Damnation, a new dramatic series premiering November 7 on USA Network, has cited John Steinbeck and Dashiell Hammett to describe the show’s depiction of rich vs. poor and brother against brother in rural Iowa during the Great Depression. In an interview with the Cleveland, Ohio Plain Dealer, Tony Tost, the show’s creator, explained that “the world of John Steinbeck as presented in The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row was a big influence, as was Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest.” An award-winning poet, essayist, and screenwriter from Springfield, Missouri, Tost earned a PhD in English from Duke University and lives in Los Angeles, where he was a writer and producer for Longmire, a TV Western that ran for five seasons. The new show is “a little tricky to describe,” added Tost, the author of three volumes of poetry and a book of cultural criticism, Johnny Cash’s American Recordings (Continuum 2011). “It’s the Dust Bowl world. It has the feel of a Western. It has the strikebreaking. It has the religious themes. It has the pulp conspiratorial element. I’ve said it’s one part Clint Eastwood, one part John Steinbeck, one part James Ellroy.” The pilot episode will air tomorrow on USA Network at 10 p.m. EST. Damnation can also be viewed on Netflix, the entertainment giant headquartered in Los Gatos, where John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.

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Of Mice and Men In the News

January 24, 2017 by 5 Comments

Image of Weekend Update anchor Colin Jost on Saturday Night Live

The January 21 episode of Saturday Night Live gave a shout-out to John Steinbeck during the weekly fake-news feature “Weekend Update,” further substantiating Steinbeck’s pop-culture standing and sending Of Mice and Men students back to the book to find out what George really says to Lennie at the end. Two-and-a-half minutes into the skit, faux news-anchor Colin Jost compares Barack Obama’s parting comment about Donald Trump (“it’s going to be ok”) with the assurance George gives Lennie before he shoots Lennie in the head. It’s a safe bet that the latest Of Mice and Men moment on TV will be seen by millions of schoolkids, and by hipper teachers too.

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In Dubious Battle: A Film Festival Viewer Compares Steinbeck’s Novel and James Franco’s Movie Adaptation

October 18, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Image of scene from James Franco's film adaptation of Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle

Recently I attended the screening of James Franco’s movie adaptation of In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck’s 1936 strike novel, at the Mill Valley Film Festival in Marin County, California. Franco, who directs and acts in the motion picture, was present for the event, which I believe was the first time In Dubious Battle was screened publicly in this country. In his remarks Franco talked about casting and directing the film, and my general impression was that he believed he was being faithful to the theme of the novel.

As it happened, I was in the process of reading In Dubious Battle for an upcoming book club event in Monterey, California, where I live, and I noted changes in the film that surprised me, and that I felt violated Steinbeck’s intention in writing the novel. This itself is not unusual, since—as Steinbeck learned when Alfred Hitchcock mangled Lifeboat—some directors seem to think they can write a better story than the author. In the course of the Mill Valley Film Festival screening, I made a number of notes for my book club presentation comparing Franco’s movie and Steinbeck’s book.

The action of Chapters 1-4 includes Jim’s introduction to Mac, Joy, and Dick—California labor agitators sympathetic to the Communist Party—and their journey together to the Torgas Valley, the fictitious venue of In Dubious Battle. Although Harry Nilsen, a Communist Party figure, isn’t mentioned in the film, it follows Steinbeck’s story faithfully enough at the start, with one exception.

In James Franco’s treatment, Joe, the father of Lisa’s baby, abandons her when she becomes pregnant; in Steinbeck’s novel, he is still on the scene and appears in a minor role later in the action, in the course of which Lisa politely spurns Jim’s advances. In Franco’s version, Joe has to leave to make room for a romantic relationship: Jim loves Lisa, but chooses the cause over happiness with her. Hollywood always needs a romantic angle, even when that requires altering an author’s story and intent.

Chapters 5-8 in the novel present the development of plans for the strike, showing how Mac and Jim organize the effort and motivate the workers, and how Jim is increasingly radicalized under Mac’s guidance. Steinbeck’s character London, targeted as a leader by the strike organizers, is well cast in James Franco’s film. In Steinbeck’s version, Dan, an elderly apple picker, falls from the tree when the ladder he is using collapses. In the movie, Mac admits breaking the ladder so the workers will get mad and the cause will be advanced. For Mac, Dan is expendable. Unlike other changes made in the film, this one seems in character, and in harmony with Mac’s idea that ends justify means—contrary to what Steinbeck believed.

By contrast, the character of Joy, another expendable worker, is miscast. Steinbeck portrays Joy as a little guy who has been so badly beaten in the past that he may have become unhinged. In the course of a key scene in the novel, Joy is recognized by Mac and Jim while stepping off a train before being shot and killed, presumably by a vigilante sniper. In James Franco’s version, Joy is an old man, and he’s killed by a policeman after delivering a rousing speech—according to Mac, the most worthwhile thing Joy has ever done.

But the biggest negative change in characterization made by the film occurs in the presentation of Doc Burton, a key player who is described in Steinbeck’s novel as a fuzzy-cheeked young man. In James Franco’s version, he’s depicted as an older man and has a minor role. Most of the ideological dialog between Doc, Jim, and Mac—to me, the heart In Dubious Battle—has been eliminated.

In Steinbeck’s original, Mac and Jim make the argument that the strikers’ collective cause is more important than their individual lives and welfare. In response, Steinbeck’s Doc expresses doubt, raising questions about ends justifying means, violence begetting violence, and the dubious outcomes that flow from unexamined motives. This gives the story the skepticism and objectivity I think Steinbeck intended readers to take away from In Dubious Battle. Omitting Doc’s dialog, as James Franco does, robs the title of its point and encourages the viewer to take sides, like the director.

On the other hand, the portrayal of the deal made by the strikers with Anderson, the sympathetic farmer, is true to the novel, as is the interest expressed by the character Al in joining the Communist Party. In Steinbeck’s version, another grower’s house is torched, and Al survives. Here the movie is less clear, leaving me uncertain whether Anderson’s house is torched and Al is actually killed, or the rumor has been concocted to anger and motivate the strikers, like Dan’s death. Omitted entirely is the character of Dakin, the destruction of his truck, and the transfer of strike leadership to London that results.

Franco’s film, like Steinbeck’s novel, shows the strikers’ volatility, their rejection of the growers’ offer to employ London if they go back to work, and the sheriff’s threat to run them off Anderson’s land if they refuse. In the movie the tents where the workers live are white and new, and the breaking through of the barricade becomes a major scene. These changes, presumably made for visual and dramatic effect, don’t violate the spirit of Steinbeck’s story. The changes made in the story’s ending do.

In the novel Doc Burton’s absence is noted when London calls a meeting to decide whether the strikers will stay and fight or to leave, and a boy enters to report that Burton has been found in a ditch. Jim insists on going to Doc and is ambushed and shot. After carrying Jim back to camp, Mac says, “Comrades, he didn’t do anything for himself.” In the film it is Mac who is shot and killed, not Jim, and in a major reversal, it is Mac who becomes a martyr to the cause that Jim will carry on. As in the novel, we don’t know whether the strikers finally decide to fight or flee. Either way, however, they lose—out of a job and blacklisted if they leave; in jeopardy for their lives if they stay. Like the battle for labor rights, their immediate outcome is dubious. Whatever may happen to them personally, it is Mac who has put them a position of increased vulnerability. Absent the dialog written by Steinbeck for Doc Burton earlier in the story, this point is lost on viewers.

Steinbeck favored objectivity where James Franco takes sides, and the film concludes with a summary of pro-labor legislation enacted, supposedly as a result of In Dubious Battle, in the years that followed. To seems likelier to me that The Grapes of Wrath can be credited with influencing laws in favor of labor rights in the aftermath of the Great Depression.
James Franco is to be commended for producing, directing, and acting (as Mac) in this, the first movie adaptation made of In Dubious Battle since it was published 80 years ago. By downplaying Doc Burton and emphasizing Mac, however, Franco has substituted certitude for objectivity about ethics, motives, and outcomes in the long struggle for labor rights. This, to me, is his film’s most serious flaw.

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In Dubious Battle Motion Picture by James Franco, Steinbeck Fan, Premieres

September 12, 2016 by 2 Comments

Image of scene from James Franco's motion picture of "In Dubious Battle"

Image of James FrancoMovie reviews, like book reviews, sometimes influence audience behavior. But as John Steinbeck proved, loyal fans often ignore reviews if they really like an author or an actor. When James Franco’s motion picture adaptation of In Dubious Battle is released in the U.S. later this year, it’s doubtful that fans of Steinbeck or Franco will be affected one way or the other by the breathless reviews and red carpet hoopla In Dubious Battle received at film festivals in September. Reviews were mixed following the movie’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, but Franco won points for making the first motion picture adaptation of Steinbeck’s 1936 strike novel, and that may be what fans appreciate most when they see the movie for themselves.

Reviews were mixed following the movie’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, but Franco won points for making the first adapatation of Steinbeck’s 1936 strike novel.

Franco reread In Dubious Battle while rehearsing the role of George for the Broadway stage revival of Steinbeck’s 1937 play-novella Of Mice and Men, which has been filmed twice despite being, in Franco’s view, far less suited for the screen than the earlier book. During a press conference at the Deauville Film Festival following Venice, he explained that he decided to make In Dubious Battle now because “as a storyteller [I knew] it would make a great movie” and because its “central conflict had a topical resonance” he felt audiences would understand. That point seemed lost on critics at the Venice Film Festival: some got facts wrong about the novel; others ignored Franco’s intentions and concentrated on his personality and appearance. The response from critics may be more discerning when Franco’s movie opens at the film festival in Toronto, where reviewers won’t have to explain Steinbeck’s story to readers, or the parallels between Steinbeck’s time and today.

Rebel with a Cause: Filming Faulkner and Steinbeck

Image of James Franco as James DeanWhatever the final verdict on the film, Franco also deserves credit for both directing and acting (as Mac) and for attracting an amazing cast, including Bryan Cranston, Vincent d’Onofrio, Robert Duvall, Ed Harris, Sam Shepard, Selena Gomez, and Natt Wolff. Franco has appeared in dozens of movies, and he’s best known by mainstream moviegoers for playing slapstick characters in Animal House pictures like The Interview. But he has portrayed intelligent characters intelligently in highbrow films and acted and directed in adaptations of novels by Faulkner even harder to film than Steinbeck.

Whatever the final verdict on the film, Franco also deserves credit for both directing and acting (as Mac), and for attracting an amazing cast.

Like Faulkner, Steinbeck learned his limits when he tried to write for Hollywood, and he preferred to leave the job of adapting to specialists like Franco’s friend Matt Rager, the screenwriter Franco turns to when he makes literary movies, including biopics about authors. In several of these films Franco portrays tormented artistes from Steinbeck’s era—including Hart Crane, James Dean, and Alan Ginsburg—about whom Steinbeck could be critical. Franco grew up in Palo Alto, where Steinbeck went to college, and he writes fiction that appeals to the kind of reader who, unlike Steinbeck, is naturally attracted to Crane, Dean, and Ginsburg.. Like these figures, and like Steinbeck, Franco follows his own drummer as an artist, and his fans—like Steinbeck’s—respond in the same spirit. For American fans, Franco’s independence, courage, and passion for Steinbeck are cause enough to celebrate the making of In Dubious Battle, despite ill-informed movie reviews at foreign film festivals.

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