Main Cast: Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Dick Foran, Genevieve Tobin
Release Year: 1936
Country: US
Run Time: 83 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Plot
Burned-out British intellectual Alan Squier (Leslie Howard) wanders into the desert service station/restaurant owned by Jason Maple (Porter Hall). Alan finds himself an object of fascination for Jason's starry-eyed daughter, Gabrielle Bette Davis, who dreams of moving to France and establishing herself. Boze Hertzlinger (Dick Foran), Gabrielle's gas-jockey boyfriend, grows jealous of Alan, but the penniless, dissipated Briton has no intention of settling down; in fact, as soon as he mooches a ride from wealthy tourists Mr. and Mrs. Chisholm (Paul Harvey and Genevieve Tobin), he's on his way out of Gabrielle's life...or so everyone thinks. Later that same day, Alan, Gabrielle, Jason, Boze, and Mr. and Mrs. Chisholm are huddled together in the selfsame restaurant, held at gunpoint by Dillinger-like desperado Duke Mantee (Humphrey Bogart) and his gang. Alan seems indifferent to the danger, toasting Duke as "the last great apostle of rugged individualism." Sensing an opportunity to give his life meaning, Alan takes Duke aside, begging the outlaw to kill him so that Gabrielle can travel to Paris on the money provided by Alan's insurance policy. When the police converge on the restaurant, Duke announces that he intends to use Mr. and Mrs. Chisholm as a shield in order to make his escape. Alan tries to stop him, receiving a bullet in the belly for his troubles. "So long, pal," growls Duke fatalistically, moments before his own death, "I'll be seein' ya soon." Alan dies in Gabrielle's arms, secure in the knowledge that, alone among the film's principals, she will be able to escape the trap of her existence. When originally presented on Broadway, Robert E. Sherwood's The Petrified Forest starred Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart. Warner Bros. intended to cast Edward G. Robinson in Duke's role, only to be thwarted by Howard, who told the studio that he himself would drop out of the project if Bogart wasn't retained. The film proved to be just the break that Bogart needed; years later, he expressed his undying gratitude to Howard by naming his daughter Leslie Bogart. One year after The Petrified Forest, Humphrey Bogart and Leslie Howard co-starred in The Stand-In. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Humphrey Bogart had been in quite a few movies before getting his first juicy role in this 1936 classic. He had played the gunslinger villain in the Broadway production of the Robert E. Sherwood play, and his co-star Leslie Howard insisted that Warner Bros. cast him in the film instead of Edward G. Robinson, who was a more bankable star. The movie was a breakthrough for Bogart, though it typecast him as a heavy. Bette Davis and Howard had teamed up two years earlier in Of Human Bondage, and the chemistry between them is important to making this quirky Western plausible. Some of the dialogue is heavy-handed, and Archie Mayo's direction tends to be predictable, but The Petrified Forest is still a fine example of vintage Hollywood melodrama that was starting to allow villains like the Bogart character to be more well-rounded and interesting. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
John Hughes - Art Director, Orry-Kelly - Costume Designer, Archie Mayo - Director, Owen Marks - Editor, Leo F. Forbstein - Composer (Music Score), Bernhard Kaun - Composer (Music Score), Leo F. Forbstein - Musical Direction/Supervision, Sol Polito - Cinematographer, Henry Blanke - Producer, Warren Lynch - Special Effects, Richard Van Enger - Special Effects, Fred Jackman, Sr. - Special Effects, Delmer Daves - Screenwriter, Charles Kenyon - Screenwriter, Robert E. Sherwood - Play Author
The Petrified Forest, first performed in 1935, is one of the frequently performed plays of Robert E. Sherwood, one of America's best-known playwrights, winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1936, 1939, and 1941. One of the reasons the play is so well known is that the 1941 movie adaptation is considered a classic of the gangster genre. Like the Broadway production, the movie starred Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart. The role of Duke Mantee, a bitter and complex sociopath, made Bogart a movie star, and his performance helped define how Hollywood was to portray gangsters ever after.
The story concerns three characters who move between love and despair: Alan Squier, a penniless intellectual who has come to the desert to die; Gabby, the cafe waitress who believes that her life would be rich with meaning if she could leave the cultural wasteland of America and go to France to study art; and Mantee, a desperate criminal who stalls his escape to reunite with a woman he never talks about. Sherwood uses them, along with the other characters who are held hostage by the gangsters at a small diner on the edge of the desert, to explore the American myths of the sensitive artist and the gangster, finding that they are not as different as they might at first seem.
Because of its blend of lively dialog, colorful characters, and psychological understanding, The Petrified Forest has remained a perennial favorite and has continuously been revived since it was first written. It is often included in anthologies of American drama and is available from Dramatists Play Service of New York.
This 1930s drama is set in the Petrified Forest area in northern Arizona. Hitchhiker Alan Squier, who sees himself as a failed writer, wanders into a roadside diner. The diner is run by Jason Maple (Porter Hall), his daughter Gabby, and her grandfather (Charley Grapewin), "an old man who was missed by Billy the Kid."
Gabby's mother was a French war bride who fell in love with Gabby's father when he was a young, handsome, uniformed American serviceman. They married and moved to the remote Petrified Forest desert in Arizona. Gabby's mother found her husband a "dull defeated man" and moved back to France when Gabby was a young child. She now sends Gabby poetry. Gabby dreams about visiting Bourges to study art. Gabby shows Alan her paintings and reads him a favorite Villon poem. Alan finds Gabby's eagerness and optimism touching and refreshing.
Duke Mantee, "world famous killer" and his gang appear, and hold everyone hostage. When Gabby is out of the room, Alan signs over an insurance policy on his life to Gabby. He asks Duke to shoot him. "It couldn't make any difference to you, Duke. After all, if they catch you, they can hang you only once..." And to another character, he explains: "Living, I'm worth nothing to her. Dead — I can buy her the tallest cathedrals, and golden vineyards, and dancing in the streets."
Casting
While Bogart was successful in the Broadway role of Mantee, he was not originally cast in the film version. Warner Brothers planned to use Edward G. Robinson, who was under contract to Warners. Legend has it that Leslie Howard lobbied Jack Warner to hire Bogart after the struggling actor called him from New York to remind him that he'd said that he wouldn't appear in a movie version without Bogart as Mantee. According to Robert Sklar, studio politics and Robinson's reluctance to take another gangster role resulted in Bogart being cast (Sklar, 1992, pp. 60–62). The film made Bogart a Hollywood star. Bogart remained grateful to Howard throughout his life — and named his daughter after him.
A dozen years afterward, Robinson played a remarkably similar role in Key Largo (1948), in which he portrayed a noted gangster momentarily holding a disparate group of people in a Floridian hotel hostage, and the hero of the movie was played by Bogart. Bogart also played a strikingly similar part himself even later in The Desperate Hours (1955), in which his gangster holds a suburban family hostage; at the time, Bogart referred to this character as "Duke Mantee grown up." In the same year, he portrayed Mantee again on television (see below).
Bogart's portrayal of Mantee mimicked the notorious and recently deceased bank robber John Dillinger, whom Bogart resembled.
The novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates opens with an amateur-theater production of The Petrified Forest set in spring 1955, the same year as the live TV performance (which is not mentioned in the novel).
^Haendiges, Jerry. "Lux Radio Theater .. episodic log". The Vintage Radio Place. http://www.otrsite.com/logs/logl1008.htm. Retrieved 2009-02-20. "
THE PETRIFIED FOREST 151 11-22-37 :59:50 Herbert Marshall, Margaret Sullivan, Eduardo Gienille, Donald Meek
THE PETRIFIED FOREST 481 04-23-45 :60:00 Ronald Colman, Susan Hayward, Lawrence Tierney. Host: Thomas Mitchell"
