Petrified Forest (1936)<br /><br />To say that Leslie Howard is perfect is to explain why Petrified Forest is sometimes a great movie. It's a movie about performances in words more than deeds, and his, among the three famous leads, is the most leading. Howard's sense of ease, his struggle for meaning without getting pompous, and his understanding of the other people from the inside is truly the meat, and the potatoes, of the movie.<br /><br />And the play, which he starred in the previous year. The movie remains a play, set mostly in one colorful (black and white) roadside restaurant and water stop on the edge of the desert. For an action picture, it sometimes talks too much, and it lacks what you would call action. But that's because it isn't an action picture, it's a literate exploration of the end of the frontier. This is exemplified by everyone, including Howard as a footloose and heartbroken loner aptly named Alan Squire, escaping the culture of civilization in Europe for the real thing, the old wild west. And he discovers that the wild west doesn't really exist any more, and that he's a man out of step with the times.<br /><br />Except that for a brief moment, the past resurfaces, namely as a gangster, a true "desperado" in the form of Humphrey Bogart, representing the end of the romanticized outlaw. Like Howard's bookish romantic, Bogart's character, Duke Mantee (another great name), is out of step. And Duke knows it just as much as Alan, but his way of showing it is with grunts and violence. Still, the two men, opposites in some ways, are in the same dilemma, and they understand it, and acknowledge it in each other.<br /><br />The witnesses for this meeting of minds and of poetry, both fine and rough, are all characters and caricatures of various kinds--the old timer who is both funny and blind to the truth of what's happening, the rich man who is so above it all he can't take the time to be afraid, and his wife, who sees the romance of Alan's position, and who see how her own life is a tragedy. The other star, of course, is Bette Davis, still fairly new to Hollywood (just five years in) but nevertheless well established with almost thirty movies made. She shines here in a role that only demands a kind of honest and starry attitude that she nails. She might not have the more moving innocence of, say, Olivia de Haviland, she provides a more likely spark and frontier spirit, repackaged for the 1930s.<br /><br />The year of the movie's release was the depth of the Depression, with Roosevelt running for reelection and the American West known more for its hardship than any sense of hope. But it's now four years after the end of prohibition and the real gangsters of earlier Warner Brothers films (including Bogart as a thug, along with Davis, appearing briefly in the great pre-code 1932 film, Three on a Match) are mostly gone from real life. Likewise, the western villains like Dillinger (the model for Duke Mantee) and Ma Barker, and of course Bonnie and Clyde, were all dead by 1934 and 1935. <br /><br />So the play, written in 1935 by multiple-Pulitzer winner Robert Sherwood, was a timely success before being adapted for film, with Leslie Howard producing for Warner Brothers. The result was almost bound for success, and though the movie is known now mostly as Bogart's breakthrough movie (his earlier films had him typecast as a second-string villain), it is really not Bogart who dominates it, but Howard. And of course, the writing, the play itself, which sounds sometimes dated to our ears. But imagine the themes of redemption, and love, and escape (in all senses) and you can hear something powerful for its time.