Shoot the intellectual

The Petrified Forest

(1936)

Golly! I am reminded why this was the one film in Warners' first gangster set that I didn't particularly want. Leslie Howard sets a standard for overacting that will live forever, though he's given a pretty good run for his money here by Bette Davis, Genevieve Tobin as a woman who married not wisely but too well, and the laughable Dick Foran as a potbellied ex-footballer [American rules] and would-be Romeo. The only sign of life on the planet comes from the building-toward-stardom Bogart as the desperado in chief.