The Intellectuals Next Time-With Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis’ Film Adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood’s “The Petrified Forest” (1936)In Mind               

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

The Petrified Forest, starring Bette Davis, Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart, from the play by Robert E. Sherwood, 1936

The 1930s were a tough time all around. Tough for hungry mouths and wandering nomads during the Great Depression that sucked all the everyday air out of society. Made a lot of crazy things happen like the rise of right wing populism, you know, the Nazi, fascist, nationalist, ethnic cleansing crowd who wreaked havoc on an unsuspecting world then and their grandchildren and great grandchildren are prepping up for a revival here in the early part of the 21^st century. It was a time of retreats, mostly, certainly a time of retreat for the intellectuals, at least those intellectuals who believed that something close to human perfection with the rise of the machine age to create greater leisure and time for thoughtfulness could happen before the millennium. They got those hopes battered first by the deeply disturbing  horrors of World War I which decimated the flower of that generation and then by the popular reversions to blood and soil, allegiance solely to the tribe and the struggle of the survival of the fittest (this time not with clubs but with guns and death-wielding high tech destruction capacities). The film under review, the adaptation of the Robert E. Sherwood play The Petrified Forest set in, well, the ancient Petrified Forest out in Arizona when only the hearty (or weary) survive takes a candid look at the defeat of the intellectuals and the disturbing reemergence of the survival of the fittest doctrine writ large and writ in a way that old Charles Darwin would have been horrified by back in the 1930s.           

The plotline is simplicity itself when you think about it. Alan, a disillusioned vagabond intellectual, a writer, played by Leslie Howard, kind of drifting along in a world that he no longer recognizes as his home finds himself in a diner on the edge of the forest where a bright young writer-painter, Gabby, played by Bette Davis, is wasting away as a waitress in her father’s business and daydreaming about heading to France to be reunited with her cultivated mother. Problem: she has no dough or nobody give her the dough and so she stagnates out on the edge of the world.  He, and she, immediately sense they are kindred spirits but there in those times nothing that could be done about it. Additionally Alan has had all his dreams punctured and he is just playing out his string.           

Enter Duke Mantee, played by rising new start Humphrey Bogart, a deadeye gangster who is on the run from every police agency in the area for having created every possible act of murder and mayhem in his time. He holds the denizens of the diner captive awaiting some frill to meet him there before they head south of the border. While he is waiting Alan hits upon the bright idea that the best way that he can help the smitten Gabby is to have Duke kill him so that Gabby can claim his insurance policy and start a new life. After some off-hand negotiations Duke agrees to do the job. No sweat off his brow, all in a day’s work. When the coppers come to get him Duke does his dastardly deed while using some customer-hostages as human shields to get away. Alan symbolically dies in Gabby’s arms knowing that his act, his gesture, will insure her future. Insure maybe, just maybe that the next time the world turns in on itself in a fit of hubris that the intellectuals will not retreat like he did. Yes, the intellectuals next time.