With most of its action confined in a lonesome diner in the boondocks of Arizona, Archie Mayo’s THE PETRIFIED FOREST knuckles down to fall in line with Robert E. Sherwood’s original play’s progressive ideology, melding continental intellectualism with the desert’s down-home patriotism, the result is exceptionally engaging and poignant.
The wandering soul in the person of a dapper Alan Squier (Howard) fetches up in the diner and immediately attracts the attention of Gabrielle (Davis), the daughter of the proprietor Jason Maple (Hall). Their meet-cute is preceded by Gabrielle’s lackadaisical fending-off the petulant courtship from Boze (Foran), a former football player who becomes the diner’s employee, the all-American jock type that doesn’t deserve a pretty young girl who reads François Villon and has French in her blood.
Gabrielle is a painter and aspires to go to Paris to pursue her vocation if she has enough dole, and Alan, happens to be a writer manqué, world-weary and looks for a purpose to live and die for, their mutual attraction is plain as day, but a penniless Alan has to evade Gabrielle’s affection, since he has nothing to offer, not until this unilateral conundrum is interceded by the advent of gangster Duke Mantee (Bogart) and his henchmen. Mantee is a cold-blooded killer on the lam, taking everyone in the diner as hostages, while awaits the arrival of his other cohorts, so that they can flee together by crossing the border to Mexico.
The sudden duress under gunpoint adds some thrills and chills initially, but the tension soon dissolves into semi-chumminess (Charley Grapewin’s Gramp Maple has a whale of time delivering jocose factoids like “a killer always holds his chin in”), characters are encouraged to give a piece of their mind that reflects a shifting mindset that is ultra-modern for its time, above all Alan’s erudite confession of the primacy of a woman’s status, a feminist manifesto out of a gentleman’s mouth. A riveting Bogart darts his gimlet eye like no one else before in his breakout role, thuggish, flinty, keeping the suspense until his last appearance on the screen, will he or won’t he execute Alan’s bold and unconventionally morbid proposition?
While a young Davis dazzles with a brilliant impression of dewy-eyed curiosity and perfervid infatuation, it is Leslie Howard, a classic, rakish silver-screen heart-throb, who holds court from stem to stern, magnifies Alan's urbane sophistication and ardent emotion, as a member of the vanishing race, the intellectuals, namby-pamby extraneously, gallant intrinsically. Despite his doomed fatality and sentimentality, he still harbors hope and magnanimity in humanity, in new generation represented by Gabrielle’s free-spirited creativity.
Howard, as the actor, is a sublime heart-stealer and heart-breaker, his Alan holds a distinction in underlying an unpopular, somehow romanticized, helplessly sensitive, almost fragile side of masculinity, which is a dying breed per se pursuant to screen presentation, particularly set athwart Bogart’s refractory toughness. Perhaps that is why, THE PETRIFIED FOREST can stand out from the crowds, and endure the test of time to flaunt its modernity and pathos to all comers.
