of the delights of life. Anyone who ever had friends is able to relate to this. 

Second, in this chapter George also recounts to Slim that Lennie grabbed a girl's dress, because he liked to touch soft fabrics. The girl mistook this for something violent. When others found out, rumor got out that Lennie sought to rape her or something to this effect. So both George and Lennie had to run away. Things like this also happen in real life. People miscommunicate and people jump to wrong conclusions with disastrous effects and consequences. 

Finally, Curley, feeling insecure about his position in the farm, lashes out against Lennie and picks a fight. Unfortunately for Curley, he messed with the wrong man. Lennie crushed Curley's hand. Again there is something realistic about this because people fight, people are insecure, and people get hurt when things like this happen. 

The most likely connections that a student reader will make are those that connect the novel and actual events, or "text to world" connections. John Steinbeck grew up in the area of California where OfMice and Men takes place. As an adult, he spent time traveling through the United States during the Great Depression and lived in agricultural laborer camps. His perspectives on the workers's lives and camp life are strongly grounded in real life. Although some work conditions have changed since the 1930s, many farm and ranch hands now are seasonal or itinerant workers with no job security and still receive few if any benefits.

Steinbeck's themes in this novel can also be connected with those he develops in other works. These include other fictional treatments, such as The Grapes of Wrath. His nonfiction coverage of the workers' situation is presented in The Harvest Gypsies. Another moving nonfiction treatment of rural families during the Great Depression is Now Let Us Praise FamousMen, with text by James Agee and photographs by Walker Evans.

Students may also be able to draw personal connections to the characters' experiences or similar ones. Many Americans work as migrant workers and their children live with them in camps or other substandard housing.

The three primary ways to connect to a text include the following:

Text to self: This is largely personal. The reader’s own life experiences allow them to draw connections to the book. For example, consider the following quote:

God a'mighty, if I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an' work, an' no trouble. No mess at all, and when the end of the month come I could take my fifty bucks and go into town and get whatever I want. Why, I could stay in a cathouse all night. I could eat any place I want, hotel or any place, and order any damn thing I could think of. An' I could do all that every damn month. Get a gallon of whisky, or set in a pool room and play cards or shoot pool." Lennie knelt and looked over the fire at the angry George. And Lennie's face was drawn in with terror. "An' whatta I got," George went on furiously. "I got you! You can't keep a job and you lose me ever' job I get.

In this quote, George complains about being stuck with Lennie. This may remind the reader of a time that they felt alienated or unwanted by their peers. Finding personal connections to a text is subject to the life experiences of each individual.

Text to text: This connection can be described as the way one text relates to another. For example, maybe the fatalistic tone of Of Mice and Men—that is, the sense that the characters are doomed from the start—reminds the reader of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Or perhaps George and Lennie’s work for and belief in a better future reminds the reader of Kino in The Pearl, another work by Steinbeck.

Text to world: This connection comes from the reader’s perceptions about how the world works. For example, maybe Lennie’s fate at the end of Of Mice and Men reminds the reader of the way those with cognitive disabilities are treated in the legal system—possibly punished without receiving the help they require.

Please note that all of these examples are hypothetical because all of these connections are highly subjective to our individual schemas—that is, our personal, previous experience, knowledge, and ideas—that affect the way we connect with literary works.

Connections in literature can be made in three different ways : 

• Text to text: When the literature is comparable to other literature
• Text to self: When the literature is comparable to personal events
• Text to world: When the literature is comparable to historical, social, or other world events

It is recommended that all readers attempt to make all three connections in order for the literature to make full meaning. After all, literature tells fictional and non-fictional accounts of everyday life within a myriad of different backdrops and scenarios. 

Depending on your particular experience with literature, and your exposure to it, you may be able to find all these connections in Of Mice and Men. 

For example:

Text to Text connections:Of Mice and Men is comparable in theme and setting to another Steinbeck novel, The Grapes of Wrath. They are not the same, just comparable. For example, both novels take place during the Great Depression. The characters are also farm-connected, and driven away by harsh or desperate situations. The same sense of desolation, poverty, hunger, and isolation permeate the works. 

Text to Self connections: Think of any time you have felt entirely alone. Did the few people around you make you feel less lonely? Have you ever been on the run from something and unsure about your future?

The title from the novel Of Mice and Men comes from a verse of the Robert Burns poem "To a Mouse" in which he writes

the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry

Think about it: When have you ever had "best laid plans" which go all wrong?

**This could also be a text to text connection, as the title comes from another work of literature.

Text to World:  Think about the historical consequences of The Great Depression and the universal topics that came with it: hunger, sadness, death, depression. Those universal themes are part of the world in which we live. Can you think of other events in history that have affected people the way that it affected those men in the story? What other consequences happened as a result of the Great Depression that affected the country, or the world as a whole? 

Those are examples of connections.

Here are some great movies with themes similar to those you can find in Of Mice and Men (not repeating any of the good ones already mentioned):

• Wonder: Auggie was born with a rare facial condition which has required 27 surgeries, and he has been homeschooled his entire life. In this movie (also a great book!), he attempts to integrate into the social structures of his local public school. The themes of finding acceptance with differences is similar to Of Mice and Men.
• Rain Man: This movie features two brothers on various adventures. Raymond, the older brother, has autism and his younger brother, Charlie, decides to use him and his keen memory abilities for his own advantages. Much like Lennie, Raymond relies primarily on a man who doesn't always have his best interests at heart.
• Radio: Based on the true story of a man in South Carolina, Radio is an intellectually challenged man who is treated unkindly by the local football team. The coach witnesses this and invites Radio to work with the team. Radio soon integrates himself into the school as an "honorary" student, but he faces discrimination again when people in the community view him as a distraction. The themes of acceptance of the mentally challenged are similar to Steinbeck's novel.
• Where Hope Grows: Calvin used to play for MLB, but now he's a washed-up alcoholic. He meets "Produce," a man with Down's Syndrome, and they form a close friendship which improves Calvin's life. The movie's themes showing how people with intellectual challenges can form meaningful friendships are similar to the friendship between Lennie and George.

If you are looking for a movie version of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men to enhance your understanding of the novella, the gold standard is the 1939 version. It was filmed shortly after the book was published in 1937, so it accurately portrays the ethos or feel of the Depression era. As it is contemporary to what is going on, there is no issue of historical inaccuracy.

Second, the film was highly praised at the time and continues to be so. It is worth noting that Steinbeck wrote the novella with the idea in mind it would be made into a movie, so the director did not have to make many alterations to the story in order to film it: it is a faithful adaptation. However, as always with a movie version, you have to keep comparing it to the book, as some aspects are different. In the movie, for example, Curley's wife is given a name, Mae, which she is not in the book.

There is also a 1981 movie based on the Broadway play version of this book.

If you are looking a parallel but different film, I would suggest the groundbreaking and deeply moving Midnight Cowboy, which is also about two down-and-out drifters who bond into a deep friendship.

This question is worded a little vaguely - there are no movies or movie references in the text of Of Mice and Men. I'm assuming that the question is asking for some films which have themes, characters or events that are similar to those found in Of Mice and Men.

Some films with common elements include:

• Freaks, 1932. This film is about the family-like community formed by the "sideshow freaks" that work in a circus, much like the brotherhood formed by the workers in OMAM. A dangerous, beautiful woman (like Curley's wife) mocks them as outsiders, and ultimately suffers for underestimating them.
• Fight Club, 1999. Though it is more famous for its eponymous violence, Fight Club addressed many of the same themes as OMAM, particularly the theme of reality vs. idealism and broken dreams. In one speech, the character Tyler Durden states that the men of his generation were raised to believe that they would be rich, famous and successful - "But we won't," he concludes, adding that "our Great Depression is our lives". This is very much related to the pursuit of dreams featured in OMAM and the realities which hold those dreams back.
• The Green Mile, 1999. While most of this film is not all that closely related to the themes of OMAM, the character of John Coffey is something like a thematic cousin to Lennie Small; he is a huge man, possibly "simple-minded" and enormously strong, but unlike Lennie, he is capable of tempering his strength, and is not ruled by his passions. His death, like Lennie's, is a sort of mercy, because there is no place in the world for someone like him; this is also a commentary on society's inability to integrate people who deviate too much from the norm.

John Steinbeck can be said to have entertained a rather bleak vision of his country of birth, but having lived through the Great Depression and witnessing the travails of migrant farm workers in the wake of Dust Bowl of the same period, it is not hard to sympathize.  Much of his fiction, particularly The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, was inspired by one of the saddest periods in the nation’s history.  That said, his depictions of migrant laborers, unfortunately, resonates today as the United States struggles with the issue of illegal immigration and that immigration’s connection to the low-wage manual labor reminiscent of the period about which Steinbeck wrote.  With this in mind, questions one might pose regarding Of Mice and Men could logically focus on parallels with today’s economic problems, the issue of labor-intensive industries moving to other countries, and the surge in illegal immigration we are currently experiencing.  Beyond that, one could also question the story’s depiction of human relationships, the difficulties experienced by George and Lennie due to the latter’s mental deficiencies during a period when understanding of such deficiencies was woefully inadequate, and the conflicts that arise when otherwise innocent misunderstandings devolve into violent confrontations.  That George ultimately decides to spare Lennie the indignities and brutality that awaits him, following the latter’s accidental murder of Curley’s wife, by killing his friend himself with a shot to the back of the head can clearly be seen as an act of mercy, but was it George’s only option, and was it at least in part motivated by George’s innate desire to be free of the burden of carrying for this huge, lumbering child-like man?  Recall the passage early in the book in which George expresses such a thought to Lennie: “George still stared morosely at the fire. ‘When I think of the swell time I could have without you, I go nuts. I never get no peace’.”  These are some of the questions one could pose of Steinbeck’s novel.

Personal connections between Of Mice and Men and the world in which we live today center on the themes addressed above.  The sorrowful atmosphere in which migrant workers continue to exist today, not just in America but across much of Europe as well, is little different from that experienced by the character’s in this story.  Not only are these people desperately seeking a better life, but many leave their families behind in the hopes of eventually saving enough money to bring them along as well.  While there are certainly plenty of “bad apples” among the hundreds of thousands of migrants, most are simply seeking a better life than they experienced in Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia.  Perhaps the most personal connection one can identify would involve the isolation and alienation many of these migrants experience.  One of the main themes of Of Mice and Men involves the notion of human companionship coupled with that desire to attain a better way of life.  Steinbeck’s novel is replete with instances of contemplation regarding human relationships and the struggle to attain “the American Dream.”  When Crooks, the African American stable-hand, consoles Lennie, he emphasizes the importance of George in Lennie’s life:

“A guy needs somebody―to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick.” 

Similarly, during a discussion between George and Slim regarding Lennie, George concedes that, for all Lennie’s faults, and despite the difficulties the big guy brings on, he is, at least, a friend:

“I ain't got no people. I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That ain't no good. They don't have no fun. After a long time they get mean. They get wantin' to fight all the time. . . 'Course Lennie's a God damn nuisance most of the time, but you get used to goin' around with a guy an' you can't get rid of him.” 

George and Lennie’s dream – a dream more reachable for Lennie than for George, given Lennie’s child-like personality – provides a motivation for George to keep moving on, from ranch to ranch or farm to farm, and he implicitly understands Lennie’s importance to his own status in life:

“George's voice became deeper. He repeated his words rhythmically as though he had said them many times before. 'Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. They come to a ranch an' work up a stake, and the first thing you know they're poundin' their tail on some other ranch. They ain't got nothing to look ahead to.” 

George abides Lennie’s dream because at least its something to ‘look ahead to,' but he shares Lennie's vision of a better life.

The importance of human relationships goes hand-in-hand with the pursuit of the aforementioned “American Dream.”  Lennie is obsessed with the dream of a farm on which he and George will raise rabbits.  George shares the dream, and appreciates the only relationship in his life:

“George said, ‘Guys like us got no fambly. They make a little stake an’ then they blow it in. They ain’t got nobody in the worl’ that gives a hoot in hell about ‘em—‘

‘But not us,’ Lennie cried happily. ‘Tell about us now.’

George was quiet for a moment. ‘But not us,’ he said.

‘Because—‘

‘Because I got you an’—‘

‘An’ I got you. We got each other, that’s what, that gives a hoot in hell about us,’ Lennie cried in triumph.”

There is no happy ending for these men, though.  As if presaging the story’s tragic conclusion, Steinbeck has Crooks, the black stable-hand, lecture Lennie on the probability that the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel might just be that train coming at him:

“I see hundreds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads. Hundreds of them. They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out there. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody never gets no land. It’s just in their head.” 

These quotes all support the notion that, for Steinbeck’s characters, and probably for Steinbeck himself, human relationships and the dream of a better life remain integral to our ability to persevere.  That they may be entirely ephemeral is a product of the formative period in Steinbeck’s life.