Leslie Howard refused to make The Petrified Forest without Humphrey Bogart
Warner Bros. wanted Edward G. Robinson to play the gangster Duke Mantee in its 1936 film of The Petrified Forest. Leslie Howard, who held final say over the script, said he would walk unless his stage partner Humphrey Bogart got the part. The role made Bogart a star, and he never forgot it.
Robert E. Sherwood's play reached Broadway in 1935 with Howard as the established name and Bogart in his first leading stage role. Sherwood modelled Mantee on John Dillinger, whom J. Edgar Hoover had named the FBI's first Public Enemy Number One in 1933 before agents killed him the following year. Bogart looked enough like Dillinger to help win the part, and he studied newsreel footage to copy the outlaw's mannerisms.
The story unfolds at a desert diner in Black Mesa, Arizona, beside the Petrified Forest, during the Depression. Alan Squier, a failed British novelist turned penniless wanderer, meets Gabrielle, the owner's daughter, who paints in secret and dreams of studying art in Bourges, where her French mother met her father. When Mantee's gang arrives on the run and holds everyone hostage, Alan makes Gabrielle the beneficiary of his life insurance and persuades the gangster to shoot him so she can escape to France. Variety reported that the studio shot two endings, one where Howard lives and one where he dies.
Bogart's gratitude lasted. In 1952 he and Lauren Bacall named their daughter Leslie Howard Bogart, after Howard had been killed when German fighters shot down his airliner between Lisbon and Bristol during the war. The part also shaped Bogart's career: in Key Largo in 1948, Robinson played a Mantee-like gangster opposite Bogart's hero, and Bogart called his hostage-taker in The Desperate Hours in 1955 Duke Mantee grown up.
Reviews were mixed. Graham Greene thought Sherwood's ideas half-baked and felt life drained from the film after its opening scene, while Jorge Luis Borges called it one of the most intense films he had seen. Radio versions followed, including one on January 7, 1940, with Bogart himself, and a 1955 live colour broadcast starred Bogart, Henry Fonda and Bacall. Bacall later gave the only surviving recording to what is now the Paley Center.
Source: The Petrified Forest
