On Saturday, June 22nd, our not-so-secret Speakeasy Cinema series, programmed by Raul Benitez, presents a screening of Archie Mayo’s proto-noir crime film The Petrified Forest (1936) starring Hollywood legends, Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart. 

In this film adaptation of the Robert E. Sherwood play, a drifter, a waitress and a notorious gangster cross paths in the Petrified Forest region of Arizona. Alan (Leslie Howard), a destitute writer, goes into the diner where Gabrielle (Bette Davis) works. Gabrielle dreams of studying art, and she and Alan connect as they talk about Europe, and she tells him her ambitions. But gangster Duke Mantee (Humphrey Bogart) shows up and takes the customers hostage. 

The Petrified Forest is best known as the film which established Humphrey Bogart as a major talent, and he almost wasn’t in it! Although he played the same role of Duke Mantee (a gangster modeled after John Dillinger whose mannerisms he studied and mimicked) in the Broadway production, the studio initially wanted to hire Edward G. Robinson until the film’s star Leslie Howard told them he wouldn’t do the film without Bogart. The actors had to provide their own wardrobe for the film.  

 In 1955, a live television version was performed in color as an installment of Producers’ Showcase, a weekly dramatic anthology, featuring Bogart (now top-billed) as Mantee, Henry Fonda as Alan, and Lauren Bacall as Gabrielle. Jack Klugman, Richard Jaeckel, and Jack Warden played supporting roles.