Curley is the main antagonist in Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.
He was played by Bob Steele in the 1939 film and Casey Siemaszko in the 1992 film.
What Makes Him Pathetic?[]
- He's a sadistic bully who enjoys making fun of and beating up larger men and takes advantage of his status as the boss's son to try to push the other workers around. He takes advantage of his size to get sympathy, knowing that he'll get respect for beating up a larger opponent but when a larger man gets the better of him he plays the victim to get other people to take his side.
- He singles Lennie out as an easy target and immediately antagonizes him, getting in Lennie's face and ordering him to respond when spoken to, despite Lennie clearly being mentally handicapped.
- In the 1939 film adaptation he's even worse as at one point he tries to run down George, Lennie and another worker named Candy on his horse just because they annoyed him, with George even saying he was trying to kill them.
- He's implied to be abusive to his wife and sees her as a trophy but gives her little attention, causing her to be very lonely and isolated.
- He viciously attacks Lennie simply for smiling vacantly (claiming Lennie was laughing at him) and brutally beats him despite Lennie refusing to defend himself, only for Lennie to crush his hand when George orders him to fight back. However the other workers are so disgusted by his unprovoked attack on Lennie that none of them show him any sympathy and reassure Lennie that Curley had it coming.
- When his wife is accidentally killed by Lennie, Curley immediately takes the opportunity to scapegoat him (despite not knowing what happened) and stirs up a number of other workers into a lynch mob, telling them to shoot Lennie in the guts to make his death painful, but he actually doesn't care about his wife's death but was using it as an excuse to get revenge on Lennie for breaking his hand. This leads to the book's tragic ending as George has to kill Lennie himself to spare him the kind of cruel death Curley would have given him.
What Makes Him a Pinhead?[]
- He fails to command respect from the other workers who aren't afraid to ridicule him to his face. He's also unable to keep his wife under control or stop her from flirting with the workers and is constantly looking for her and asking where she is.
- He attacks Lennie for no good reason in front of the other workers and expects to get sympathy for it, only for them to all side with Lennie when he breaks Curley's hand as they clearly saw he attacked a mentally disabled man for no reason. As a result he's humiliated when the workers force Curley to lie about his injury, saying if he gets Lennie fired they will tell everyone what really happened and he'll be made a fool of. The scene also shows his cowardice as he starts crying when Lennie fights back and is afraid to even look at him afterward.
- His attempt to kill George, Lennie and Candy in the 1939 film is also very stupid as he does so in broad daylight in front of everyone, and likely gets away with it only because of his status as the boss's son.
- His neglect of his wife ultimately gets her killed by Lennie as she goes to him for sympathy and invites him to stroke her hair, and when she yells at him to stop he panics and breaks her neck by accident. Had Curley paid proper attention to her she would not have approached Lennie and this would not have happened.
- While he does incite the other workers to hunt down Lennie after his wife's death, this doesn't take much effort given the setting's prejudice against the mentally handicapped, and the other workers are easy to manipulate since they're uneducated and aren't thinking rationally in the heat of the moment. He does put some thought into it as he tells them where they can obtain guns, but this is a fairly basic level of knowledge and doesn't seem that impressive.
- Despite hunting for Lennie with a number of other workers he’s still unable to find him before George mercy-kills him which foils his plan to get personal revenge on Lennie. He's also fooled by George's story that he did so in self-defense, with the ending reinforcing his lack of awareness by showing that he's perplexed as to why George is distraught at his friend's death.