The Petrified Forest (1936) on Netflix
In the Arizona desert, Gabrielle Maple waits tables at her father's diner and dreams of France. A penniless writer, Alan Squier, drifts in. The killer Duke Mantee is heading their way.
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- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Alan Squier, a British writer with one published novel behind him, has run out of money when he walks into a roadside diner at Black Mesa, Arizona, near the Petrified Forest. Jason Maple runs the place with his father Gramp and his daughter Gabrielle, who paints, reads poetry and longs to move to Bourges, France, where her mother lives. Gabrielle lets Alan see her paintings and reads him a poem by François Villon, and Boze Hertzlinger, the diner employee who has courted her without success, grows jealous. Alan rides out of town with the Chisholms, wealthy tourists, but on the road they meet Duke Mantee, a fugitive gangster, and his gang, and everyone is brought back to the diner under Mantee's gun.
Cast
- Nina Campanaas Paula
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Petrified Forest (1936)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Warner Bros. wanted the more bankable Edward G. Robinson as gangster Duke Mantee, but Leslie Howard, whose contract gave him final script control, refused to appear in the film without Humphrey Bogart as his co-star.
SPOILER
Warner Bros. filmed two endings of the film, according to Variety: Leslie Howard's character dies in one and survives in the other.- Playwright Robert E. Sherwood based Duke Mantee on gangster John Dillinger, named by J. Edgar Hoover in 1933 as the FBI's first "Public Enemy #1"; Dillinger was gunned down by FBI agents in 1934.
- Humphrey Bogart won the stage role of Duke Mantee partly because he resembled John Dillinger, and he studied film footage of the gangster and copied some of his mannerisms.
- Humphrey Bogart stayed grateful to Leslie Howard for the rest of his life; in 1952 he and Lauren Bacall named their daughter in honor of Howard, who was killed when the German air force shot down his BOAC flight during World War II.
- The Warner Bros. sound stage where The Petrified Forest was filmed later became the home of Conan O'Brien's TBS television program.
- Friz Freleng's 1937 Merrie Melodies cartoon She Was an Acrobat's Daughter parodies the film, showing a cinema audience watching The Petrified Florist, starring Bette Savis and Lester Coward.
