The Petrified Forest is a philosophically romantic story of life in the most desolate places, hence the title. It's set in the Petrified Forest area in northern Arizona. An intellectual hitchhiker played by Trevor Howard drifts into a roadside diner run by a proud, traditionalist man, his dreamy daughter Bette Davis, and her grandfather, an old man with a lot of stories about the old days and a fascination with outlaws.<br /><br />When Davis's mother moved back to France when she was a young child, she felt like everything in her heart moved there with her, leaving her an empty shell of herself living with her stern, purist father. Davis reads poetry, dreams about visiting Bourges and wants to study art. But she's in a dry, dead nowhere working a tedious job and being pursued stubbornly by hunky jocks. When Howard arrives, he is so much more schooled and wise, having been all around the world, and by that mere background, he draws naturally in to conversation with strangers beyond small talk and eventually focuses in on the one fit to enter his adventurous, idealistic, strangely humble existence. That eventual focus is the character of Bette Davis, his lone waitress, out of her element, to whom he expresses interest in seeing her paintings and hearing her recite her favorite poem. To Howard, who appears to sees himself as an unsuccessful writer, she is the future and he finds her enthusiasm and optimism both endearing and revitalizing.<br /><br />Hurtling headlong into this nonentity of a world is Humphrey Bogart, nailing the rotten-to- the-core persona of his character, a wanted gangster, who with his gang of ruffians, holds everyone in the diner hostage. However, some of life's dead skin has been blistered and peeled back. Trevor Howard gets to the heart of exchanging stimulating words with the stoic villain of Bogart, and makes an agreement with him. With Davis out of the room by chance, Howard signs over an insurance policy to her and asks Bogie to shoot him. His rationalization is that he is of no use to a rose in need of watering like Davis if he is alive. The world simply does not seem as if to work that way. If he is dead, however, she can live her dreams.<br /><br />Like Howard's individualist protagonist, the film is a profound compromise. It does not settle for a film noir. It does not settle for a love story. Even involving one's subject matter with another's in the same plot may remain within one genre, one conventional environment. By not so much combining the two but rather looking both ways in perceiving an impression of the world, Robert E. Sherwood and those who adapted his play, stages a confrontation between the two outlooks, holding them up side by side and relating their shocking compatibility. That is what is very special about The Petrified Forest. For a picture made in the 1930s, it is exceptionally written and acted, a timeless work of eagerness and tenderness amidst peers which were poles apart.