The director’s interpretation of the opening sequence is very different and a lot more dramatic. The film starts with the opening titles; these are very dark and mysterious and are running over high pitched, tense music. This darkness and the pitch of the music suggests bad things are about to happen and suggests something eerie and unnerving. The titles continue over the music and the strings become higher and higher, creating a tenser and tenser atmosphere. A train is heard and there is a silhouette of light as the bars of the train tracks are reflected, the titles are still showing and the dark music is still playing. The Director’s have changed the opening location from the descriptive valley of Soledad to the dark, brooding train tracks. This makes the opening very nerving and the bars reflecting the light give a sense of jail and imprisonment, which gives you a hint of what is to come. When you hear the movement of the train over the tracks the music stops and you can only hear the train and see the dark screen. However the predominately dark and foreboding music soon starts again and you begin to see shadows of light on a man sat on the train. The light is casting a half crescent shape upon this mans face, half in the light, half in the shadows and everywhere else is dark, this is very atmospheric and creates a very nerving, tense atmosphere. The man sat in the train is George, although the viewers don’t know this. All the focus is on George and you can see him sat thinking quietly, with a dark, tense, scared, brooding expression on his face, almost like a flashback to the end of the novel.
The scene then flashes back to another scene away from George, in which is set in Weed and shows a girl in a red dress running. The music becomes a lot louder and lower pitched and speeds up creating a sense of panic and urgency. The camera is focused on a young girl running through the fields of Weed, she is wearing a red dress, which has been ripped and pulled of her shoulders, with her hair all messy and out of place and it appears that she has been attacked. The young girl is silently and franticly running through the fields and all you can hear is the dark, foreboding music gradually speeding up as the girl becomes more and more frantic and runs quicker and quicker towards the fields. There is terror on the girl’s face and she looks distraught and you can hear her crying and panicking, this immediately draws our attention in and we immediately start to wonder what has happened to the girl.
The music continues to become louder and faster and the scene changes to see two men, Lennie and George, running and fleeing through the brush and the woods. One of them, George is like the leader and keeps pulling Lennie to hurry up and keeps shouting “c’mon” to him, they both have fear and terror on their faces.
The girl starts screaming when she is near the fields and the workers in the fields hear her, it then changes back to see Lennie and George still running through the brush, with the music gradually becoming louder and more and more tense, until it reaches a crescendo and becomes very loud and very tense. The scene then changes to dogs and men on horses chasing after Lennie and George. The music is very loud, with big clashes and big drums; this creates more tension and suspense and adds to the foreboding atmosphere. The scene keeps changing between the men and the dogs searching and Lennie and George fleeing from them, this makes them feel like wild animal that are being hunted and hounded. There is a sharp contrast between the men who are in the light and who are full of anger and hatred and Lennie and George, who are in the dark brush and trees and who have terror and fear on their faces. Gradually the music becomes softer and less menacing as Lennie and George hide in the edges of the bank and the men start to retreat back to Weed. This change in music also allows the dialogue between the men to be heard and the quietness of their surroundings.
In all of the opening scene you don’t get to see much of the countryside that Steinbeck describes in the novel instead it goes straight into the action, to captivate the audience’s attention and it makes it seem much worse than it is, it is very over dramatised. The novel gives much more vague details of what happened and there is only a vague allusion to what happened in Weed, with George referring to it briefly and in more detail to Slim later on in the novel. However in the film the directors have decided to go straight into the action and it is less ambiguous than the novel. It is more obvious and so less thinking is required and it implies that something bad has happened, however in the novel you don’t get this foreboding, strange sense that something bad has happened.
In the film, after the chase scene, an additional scene has been added, where George and Lennie are seen getting onto a train. This scene is set at night and is a few hours after the previous scene in Weed, there is no music you can just hear and see the train passing through. It shows Lennie and George jumping on to the train trying not to be caught, whilst the train is still moving. This shows the urgency of them needing to get out of Weed and they will use any means possible and it also makes them seem like fugitives on the run, referring to the bad things which happened previously.
On the train, we see George and Lennie sat in an empty room and we start to see the relationship between the two. George seems a lot cleverer than Lennie and we begin to see that he is the leader of the two men. Lennie seems to respect George and wants to be like him, this is shown through him copying George’s movements like the way the he sits. Lennie also seems more handicapped whereas in the novel Lennie just seems slightly dumb or retarded, however in the film he does actually seem disabled. This scene has been added to show us the relationship between George and Lennie, whereas in the novel it is shown much later when they are in the woods travelling to the ranch and also to show that it is the end of the flashback. At the end of this scene, it is dark again and the camera goes back to George’s half lit face, like the beginning of the novel. It shows George thinking about what has happened, almost like and ending and the darkness makes it very atmospheric.
The final scene of the opening is the Urban City scene. It shows 1930s America and how people were dressed and what little towns looked like and it also shows Lennie and George going onto a bus to go to the ranch. This has been added to contextualise the film and gives us the sense of the period the novel is set in, without a narrator doing it.
Overall the Smith/Sinise film Version is more dramatic and obvious than Steinbeck’s novel. Although both have similar opening ideas, the film is less ambiguous than the novel and is a lot more obvious, making it easier to watch and understand.
By Anisah Lokat 10P
