The Petrified Forest

One of the variants on the GRAND HOTEL theme halfway between the pleasant comings and goings at that hostelry and the screaming disasters of, say, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE. This screen version of Robert E. Sherwood's smash play is handled with great care by director Archie Mayo and a sterling cast. This was the film that catapulted Humphrey Bogart to fame, but without Leslie Howard's insistence on Bogart for the part of Duke Mantee, Bogart might never have gotten his big movie break.

This film is really about the confrontation between intellectualism and brute force. Howard, an idealistic writer and world traveler who has grown weary of life's cruelties, finds him...