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The Petrified Forest (Warner). One school of cinema criticism holds that, since the camera can reproduce motion, and since changes in cinema sets are more easily managed than in the theatre, any film which fails to include wide geographical range combined with something in the nature of a Mack Sennett chase falls short of its function. The Petrified Forest, an expert adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood's successful play, is a convenient case in point for critics who believe that this theory is nonsense. All the significant action of the piece occurs in the lunch room of a prairie Bar-B-Q parlor. There an itinerant romanticist (Leslie Howard) in search of a reason for living or Hying, a neurotic gangster (Humphrey Bogart) running away from a sheriff's posse, the proprietor's daughter (Bette Davis), who reads Villon in the intervals between serving customers, her grandfather (Charley Grapewin), whose proudest memory is that Billy the Kid once fired at him and missed, spend most of their time sitting around and talking. Behind the lines of their talk, the picture lays the fuses of a superb melodramatic situation which explodes suddenly with the arrival of the posse.
When the smoke clears away, all four principal characters have more or less found what they are looking for. Cinemaddicts who go to The Petrified Forest looking for something as exciting as prairie pictures with Indians on horseback will do likewise. Like the play, of which Screenwriters Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves and Director Archie Mayo were daring enough to make the film an almost literal transcription, the picture is an enormously skillful romantic melodrama, so smoothly acted and so shrewdly written that even the pseudo-philosophy uttered by Leslie Howard seems worth listening to. Good shot: Gangster Duke Mantee listening to a football game on the radio.
The Lady Consents (RKO). Ann Harding has a clause in her contract which permits her to select her own stories. The only kind of stories she likes are those in which she appears as a lady who, disappointed in love, eventually gets what she wants by mouthing whimsicalities beneath a stiff upper lip. The Lady Consents, true to type, is less painful than most of Miss Harding's pictures: 1) The dialog is consistently literate; 2) Margaret Lindsay as Miss Harding's rival gives a clever impersonation of a hardboiled vixen; 3) The picture includes a character new to the cinema, that of a lovable father-in-law (Edward Ellis) who, by dying heroically after a propitious shooting accident, helps reunite Ann Harding and her husband (Herbert Marshall).