REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

   

THE PETRIFIED FOREST. Warner Brothers, 1936. Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Genevieve Tobin, Dick Foran, Charlie Grapewin, Joe Sawyer, Porter Hall, and Adrian Morris. Screenplay by Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves, from the play by Robert E. Sherwood. Directed by Archie Mayo.

   Sherwood’s play and the film made from it have not aged well, but if you can accept the artificiality and pardon the pseudo-poetics, it remains oddly fascinating and very watchable.

   The contrived plot has wandering writer manqué Leslie Howard turning up at an isolated eat-here-and-get-gas joint owned by self-styled militiaman Porter Hall, run by his would-be poet daughter Bette Davis (she reads Francois Villon and dreams of seeing Paris) with the eager assistance of lustful pump-jockey Dick Foran, and the interference of grandfather Charles Grapewin, who never stops cadging drinks and telling about the time he met Billy the Kid.

   Then into this mix of flammable futility walks Duke Mantee (Bogart) and his retinue of desperadoes, weary with hunting and fain would lie down. And the rest of the show is the collision of the gangsters’ irresistible force against the all-too-moveable dreams of the others.

   It’s all quite talky and contrived, but I found myself drawn into it anyway. Time and again the aspirations of the ordinary folk get dashed to bits by the bad guys till only Leslie Howard’s doomed romanticism is left to counter Bogart’s lethal fatalism. They spar like gunfighters jockeying for position, edging toward the final shoot-out that must leave one of them dead in the dust, and when it comes, it hits with real intensity.

   The actors carry Sherwood’s ideas with a bluff grace that rises to poesy. I was particularly taken by Dick Foran’s horny has-been football star and Porter Hall’s would-be tough-guy, perfect foils for Howard and Bogart. Davis evokes just the right note of dream-struck, and Grapewin’s old-timer is simply delightful, needy and comic at the same time.

   And then there’s Bogart, splendidly awful in the film that established him in Hollywood.

   Warners bought the play in a package deal with Leslie Howard pre-set to star. They had Cagney and Robinson under contract, but Howard insisted on Bogart, who played Mantee in the stage production. Bogey’s performance is stagey, mannered and over-emphatic, but it’s riveting. The minute he lurches in, arms akimbo, face stamped with the mask of tragedy, it’s as if Frankenstein’s monster had invaded the set. You simply can’t take your eyes off him, bad as he is. And he gets the best line in the whole movie: “You can talk sittin’ down, I heard ya doin’ it.”

   Yes, he’s way too theatrical, but somehow Bogie fits this film as no other actor could have. I’m glad he shed the mannerisms and moved on to become the legend that he was, but I still appreciate this hammy debut into the ranks of the Tough Guys.