Man on Fire (1987 film) Conti, "is suitably sinister". Mi Samantha compares Creasy and herself to the main characters of "Of Mice and Men", George Milton and Lenny Small. In regards to Samantha, James stated that "this literary child breaks through Creasy's tough-guy defenses." Sachs said that Samantha "a survivor in her own right - of a troubled marriage, having no friends, etc." but that she is "too smart and adorable to resist." Richardson said "[t]hey talk about the works of John Steinbeck and the fine points of jogging, and before you can say "Lolita", the pair are involved in a kind of romance." Kaufman
John Steinbeck appeared in the December 1945 issue of Woman's Home Companion magazine as "The Pearl of the World." It was illustrated by John Alan Maxwell. The novel is an imaginative telling of a story which Steinbeck had heard in La Paz in 1940, as related in "The Log From the Sea of Cortez", which he described in Chapter 11 as being "so much like a parable that it almost can't be". Steinbeck traveled to Mexico for the filming with Wagner who helped with the script; on this trip he would be inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote