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It's no wonder your wife kicked you out. But it's no wonder she fell for you in the first place
Because I have not yet seen the finale of Hannibal, my Tumblr interactions are currently self-limited to sites where it should not be possible to encounter even a stray crossover Richard Armitage, like Archaic Wonder, Dark Beauty (tentacles, nice), and Leslie Howard Forever. The latter has just reminded me that I never wrote about The Petrified Forest (1936), even though it formed a critical part of my adult discovery of Leslie Howard in 2008. Let's fix that.
When I say that I have acquired my knowledge of film all out of order, I mean it. The Petrified Forest also marked my introduction to Bette Davis. She was my age at the time and has no difficulty playing about fifteen years younger as the story's heroine, Gabrielle Maple. Gabby is the only child of a man who runs the most neglected roadside café in Arizona and an absent Frenchwoman who stuck out a year or two in the tumbleweed wastes with the father of her war baby before fleeing prudently back to Bourges, from which she sends her daughter yearly care packages of French literature; she's smarter than her father who still plays at soldiers with the Black Horse Vigilantes, smarter than her grandfather endlessly retelling the time Billy the Kid didn't actually shoot at him, and orders of magnitude smarter than the college football never-was with whom she is going through the motions of courtship because there's nothing better to do. The desert is beautiful and she despises it: "They say it's full of mystery, and it's haunted, and all that. Well, maybe it is. But there's something in me that makes me want something different." True to the double-edged nature of wishes, two strangers from the outside world arrive on her doorstep in the same day, a down-at-heels drifter with a fatalist's way with words and a gangster with a nationally broadcast manhunt close behind him. The results are very clearly a well-filmed stage play, with only minimal effort made to open the action out for the screen, but unless you have a problem with tightly focused character dramas, it doesn't suffer thereby.
Famously, The Petrified Forest is the movie that made Humphrey Bogart a star—he had originated the role of Duke Mantee in the original Broadway play, but Warner Bros. planned to replace him with Edward G. Robinson on film. Leslie Howard refused to reprise his part onscreen unless his co-star was given the same consideration. The rest is film history and Casablanca (1942) playing at the Brattle every Valentine's Day until the end of time.1 Saying that Bogart's subsequent career rewarded his friend's trust, however, skips over the fact that he's also just really good in the part. Playwright Robert E. Sherwood based Mantee's character on John Dillinger, who was dramatically gunned down by federal agents in 1934; Bogart reportedly studied footage of Dillinger and his gang for his portrayal. I can't evaluate the likeness for myself, but it's notable that while some of his crew have the slangy theatricality of movie hoods, Mantee himself looks mostly like a man who's much too young to be as hard-bitten as he is. Even in his shirtsleeves, unshaven, run to earth, he has an edgy magnetism, hands curiously suspended like a gunslinger ready to draw; his eyes are constantly taking in the room, combat-focus. He doesn't have a romantic streak so much as an odd, deliberate loyalty, so that he will wait as promised for his lover long past the point where any other self-respecting gangster would have chucked the moll and run for the border, and he'll agree in all seriousness to honor a quixotic deathwish from a stranger he met only a few hours before. The violence in him is nothing so obvious as simmering. Onstage, where the audience's attention cannot be directed as meticulously as on film, you'd have needed co-stars of Howard's caliber to keep him from simply walking off with the show.2
[Two-hour delay goes here, in the course of which I obtain my father's assistance in figuring out how to uninstall a particularly sticky application that installed itself without bothering to ask me first. That was . . . not fun.]
Although the Brooklyn Daily Eagle's description of the delicacy and melancholy of Howard's performance is quite accurate, they are not primarily the reason I love him in the film. His character is a curious twist against type: his poetry3 and his whimsical fatalism make him look like the disillusioned dreamer looking to do one last good deed, but the facts of Alan Squier's life describe a rather sketchy failure—a novelist manqué who was more content to be kept by his publisher's wife than to write the great American anything, a self-declared intellectual who proclaims himself an outmoded species and neurosis the work of a vengeful Nature, his air of melancholy romanticism undermined by his volatile sense of humor. He's as likely to snicker after a philosophical pronouncement as cap it with another aphorism. Even his accent is not quite the cachet of class it first appears: when eagerly asked if he's English, Squier replies with the half-apologetic admission of a commonly disabused illusion, "No. You might call me an American once removed." He attempts to pay Gabby for his meal with the romantic gesture of a first and last kiss, only to be made to confess shamefacedly that he hasn't a penny in his pockets. He doesn't intend to entangle himself in her life any more than the play-acting of chivalry demands. It seems to surprise him more than anyone that he changes his mind. If he's really in search of anything, it's a grand exit: he claims to be hitchhiking across America to drown himself in the Pacific Ocean, which he later modifies to a burial in the Petrified Forest. "It'll inspire people to say of me, 'There was an artist who died before his time.'" Sydney Carton, he's not. He's no Quixote, either, a gentle anachronism hurt into gallant madness; he seems to find tilting at windmills too much of a commitment, choosing instead to fade elegantly out of the picture, trading on a kind of wistful self-destruction. And it is exactly that confusing blend of genuinely attractive qualities with the danger signals of a complete fuckup that interests me, much as it does Gabby. It all goes a bit Liebestod in the end.
And Davis is very good, though she's less complicated than her male foils: the nowhere girl whose innocence is curdling for want of experience. She was a studio substitution, but she holds her own.4 I just like the film, all right? It's not as dreamy as it first looks. This recollection sponsored by my wonderful backers at Patreon.
1. In thanks and memoriam, Bogart and Bacall's daughter—born in 1952—was named Leslie Howard Bogart.
2. I don't know if Slim Thompson originated his role onstage, too, but he's one of the supporting highlights of the film: a rare black character in the era of the Production Code who doesn't have to be subordinate. As one of Mantee's gang, he carries a shotgun and operates as independently as any of his fellow criminals; he has a striking, scathing interchange with a black chauffeur who won't accept a drink without asking his employers for permission: "'Is it all right, Mr. Chisholm?' Ain't you heard about the big liberation? Come on, take your drink, weasel!" He appears to have done very little else on film, which I was sorry to find out.
3. Gabby is reading her way through François Villon as the story starts. Once she and Alan meet, Swinburne's translation of the "Ballade for a Bridegroom" forms a recurring refrain.
4. I still haven't tracked down the 1934 Of Human Bondage in which she and Howard starred together for the first time, although I know it was her breakout role. Recommendations for? Against? I bounced off the novel in college.
When I say that I have acquired my knowledge of film all out of order, I mean it. The Petrified Forest also marked my introduction to Bette Davis. She was my age at the time and has no difficulty playing about fifteen years younger as the story's heroine, Gabrielle Maple. Gabby is the only child of a man who runs the most neglected roadside café in Arizona and an absent Frenchwoman who stuck out a year or two in the tumbleweed wastes with the father of her war baby before fleeing prudently back to Bourges, from which she sends her daughter yearly care packages of French literature; she's smarter than her father who still plays at soldiers with the Black Horse Vigilantes, smarter than her grandfather endlessly retelling the time Billy the Kid didn't actually shoot at him, and orders of magnitude smarter than the college football never-was with whom she is going through the motions of courtship because there's nothing better to do. The desert is beautiful and she despises it: "They say it's full of mystery, and it's haunted, and all that. Well, maybe it is. But there's something in me that makes me want something different." True to the double-edged nature of wishes, two strangers from the outside world arrive on her doorstep in the same day, a down-at-heels drifter with a fatalist's way with words and a gangster with a nationally broadcast manhunt close behind him. The results are very clearly a well-filmed stage play, with only minimal effort made to open the action out for the screen, but unless you have a problem with tightly focused character dramas, it doesn't suffer thereby.
Famously, The Petrified Forest is the movie that made Humphrey Bogart a star—he had originated the role of Duke Mantee in the original Broadway play, but Warner Bros. planned to replace him with Edward G. Robinson on film. Leslie Howard refused to reprise his part onscreen unless his co-star was given the same consideration. The rest is film history and Casablanca (1942) playing at the Brattle every Valentine's Day until the end of time.1 Saying that Bogart's subsequent career rewarded his friend's trust, however, skips over the fact that he's also just really good in the part. Playwright Robert E. Sherwood based Mantee's character on John Dillinger, who was dramatically gunned down by federal agents in 1934; Bogart reportedly studied footage of Dillinger and his gang for his portrayal. I can't evaluate the likeness for myself, but it's notable that while some of his crew have the slangy theatricality of movie hoods, Mantee himself looks mostly like a man who's much too young to be as hard-bitten as he is. Even in his shirtsleeves, unshaven, run to earth, he has an edgy magnetism, hands curiously suspended like a gunslinger ready to draw; his eyes are constantly taking in the room, combat-focus. He doesn't have a romantic streak so much as an odd, deliberate loyalty, so that he will wait as promised for his lover long past the point where any other self-respecting gangster would have chucked the moll and run for the border, and he'll agree in all seriousness to honor a quixotic deathwish from a stranger he met only a few hours before. The violence in him is nothing so obvious as simmering. Onstage, where the audience's attention cannot be directed as meticulously as on film, you'd have needed co-stars of Howard's caliber to keep him from simply walking off with the show.2
[Two-hour delay goes here, in the course of which I obtain my father's assistance in figuring out how to uninstall a particularly sticky application that installed itself without bothering to ask me first. That was . . . not fun.]
Although the Brooklyn Daily Eagle's description of the delicacy and melancholy of Howard's performance is quite accurate, they are not primarily the reason I love him in the film. His character is a curious twist against type: his poetry3 and his whimsical fatalism make him look like the disillusioned dreamer looking to do one last good deed, but the facts of Alan Squier's life describe a rather sketchy failure—a novelist manqué who was more content to be kept by his publisher's wife than to write the great American anything, a self-declared intellectual who proclaims himself an outmoded species and neurosis the work of a vengeful Nature, his air of melancholy romanticism undermined by his volatile sense of humor. He's as likely to snicker after a philosophical pronouncement as cap it with another aphorism. Even his accent is not quite the cachet of class it first appears: when eagerly asked if he's English, Squier replies with the half-apologetic admission of a commonly disabused illusion, "No. You might call me an American once removed." He attempts to pay Gabby for his meal with the romantic gesture of a first and last kiss, only to be made to confess shamefacedly that he hasn't a penny in his pockets. He doesn't intend to entangle himself in her life any more than the play-acting of chivalry demands. It seems to surprise him more than anyone that he changes his mind. If he's really in search of anything, it's a grand exit: he claims to be hitchhiking across America to drown himself in the Pacific Ocean, which he later modifies to a burial in the Petrified Forest. "It'll inspire people to say of me, 'There was an artist who died before his time.'" Sydney Carton, he's not. He's no Quixote, either, a gentle anachronism hurt into gallant madness; he seems to find tilting at windmills too much of a commitment, choosing instead to fade elegantly out of the picture, trading on a kind of wistful self-destruction. And it is exactly that confusing blend of genuinely attractive qualities with the danger signals of a complete fuckup that interests me, much as it does Gabby. It all goes a bit Liebestod in the end.
And Davis is very good, though she's less complicated than her male foils: the nowhere girl whose innocence is curdling for want of experience. She was a studio substitution, but she holds her own.4 I just like the film, all right? It's not as dreamy as it first looks. This recollection sponsored by my wonderful backers at Patreon.
1. In thanks and memoriam, Bogart and Bacall's daughter—born in 1952—was named Leslie Howard Bogart.
2. I don't know if Slim Thompson originated his role onstage, too, but he's one of the supporting highlights of the film: a rare black character in the era of the Production Code who doesn't have to be subordinate. As one of Mantee's gang, he carries a shotgun and operates as independently as any of his fellow criminals; he has a striking, scathing interchange with a black chauffeur who won't accept a drink without asking his employers for permission: "'Is it all right, Mr. Chisholm?' Ain't you heard about the big liberation? Come on, take your drink, weasel!" He appears to have done very little else on film, which I was sorry to find out.
3. Gabby is reading her way through François Villon as the story starts. Once she and Alan meet, Swinburne's translation of the "Ballade for a Bridegroom" forms a recurring refrain.
4. I still haven't tracked down the 1934 Of Human Bondage in which she and Howard starred together for the first time, although I know it was her breakout role. Recommendations for? Against? I bounced off the novel in college.
no subject
... Okay, now I must read your entry.
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That's wonderful! Thank you for passing on the story to me. One of my mother's clients a few years ago had acted with him in Hamlet on Broadway; apparently he was easy to corpse, so any time Hamlet had his back to the audience, all the spear-carriers tried.
no subject
What a patient man!
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I like that phrase, and both Bogart and Howard sound wonderful. Another for the Netflix queue, if they have it.
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They should—I think I got it from Netflix originally. Enjoy!
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I haven't seen that in years! I remember it having everybody on the planet in it, even people who weren't ordinarily in the same movies. Also it won serious points with me for all of its non-Anglophone characters speaking their native languages, so if you don't like subtitles, this is not the film for you. (I know you like subtitles.) Let me know what you think!
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This is almost certainly true.
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Data point noted! I will probably see it the next time it comes around on TCM.