One of the many pleasant features of Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest* is that—in the best Pauline manner—it has been made to mean all things to all men. It is perfectly possible to enjoy it as the fantastic and very exciting and amusing melodrama it is, and to take, at its own story-telling worth, the tale it so adroitly unfolds about a literary panhandler who in the course of his wanderings falls in love with the waitress in the lunchroom of an Arizona gasoline station and is suddenly involved with a famous killer and his gang.
Or it is just as possible to share one's admiration for the melodrama—as a melodrama—with the very real admiration one at all times feels for the uncommonly skillful manner in which it has been directed by Arthur Hopkins and in which it is acted by such capable players as Humphrey Bogart, Charles Dow Clark, Peggy Conklin, and above all (as goes without saying) Leslie Howard.
Yet to those who want to look deeper there is more to find in The Petrified Forestthan either an enjoyable melodrama or an excellent performance—even if the search for it is sometimes a challenging job. Unless I miss my guess, Mr. Sherwood has put his heart into the writing of a tantalizing allegory which, underneath its romantic and ingratiating trimmings, is as grimly stoical as one could imagine, and which is shot through with interesting implications.
The petrified forest of his tale is no mere natural curiosity in far-off Arizona. It is the whole of our American civilization, which Mr. Sherwood believes to be fossilized. Some talk of Communism in the form of a mild argument is the first thing we hear in his desert lunchroom. Then his more prominent characters stray one by one into his drama. Little by little we begin to get some hints at what it is Mr. Sherwood is saying obliquely and in highly acceptable theatrical terms.
I may be entirely wrong, but I suspect he is telling us that the pioneer (as represented by the waitress's grandfather), who has no new country to explore and who can only look back wistfully to the days of Billy the Kid, is an obsolete figure deserving to die; that the football player (who works at the filling station and is also in love with the waitress) is an example of fatuous but physically courageous "third generation" youth whose only glorious hours were his college years; that the play's American Legionnaires are men who have ceased to be the men they once were in the particular emergency which created them; and that the hard-boiled killer and the disillusioned panhandler (or, if you will, the writer who has failed to do what he set out to do) are the last "rugged individualists" left in our established order as Mr. Sherwood has painted it. The waitress, who is a frustrated artist and who may yet become a great painter, is the hope of the future. For her sake the panhandler gladly persuades the killer to shoot him (without her knowing of his request) so that she can escape from her bondage in the stagnant present and so that the dream which has died in him may become an actuality in her.
I may misread Mr. Sherwood's meaning. His symbolism (which is written so that each spectator can make it his own) may prove somewhat mystifying on occasion. But his play is an engrossing one. It is as entertaining as it is stimulating, as exciting as it is provocative. In its quiet, indirect way it is the most ambitious of Mr. Sherwood's dramas. It has genuine felicity of thought as well as of phrasing. Throughout it protects its fantasy by a sense of humor which is as irresistible in its high spirits as it is neat in its statement. I have already hinted at the skill not only with which Mr. Hopkins has directed the production but with which it is acted. But I cannot resist adding that as good as Blanche Sweet (of movie fame) is as the rebellious wife of a rich man, and commendable as are the performances of both Charles Dow Clark and Peggy Conklin as the garrulous grandfather and the sensitive though profane waitress, Mr. Bogart and Mr. Howard are even better. Mr. Bogart, who since Cradle Snatchers has suffered a good deal from the drawbacks of type-casting, cuts loose from the suave young worldlings he has played with varying success, to act the killer in an excellent and quietly dominating "tough guy" way. Mr. Howard is to be seen at his most charming, casual, and effective best as the literary panhandler. He brings a rich imagination to his playing. He manages to combine something of the indescribable pathos of Charlie Chaplin with the attractiveness of a matinee idol. He continues to be the completely ingratiating master he has always been of pointed and humorous understatement.
_ .
* The Petrified Forest, by Robert Emmet Sherwood. Directed by Arthur Hopkins. Setting by Raymond Sovey. With a cast including Humphrey Bogart, Leslie Howard, Peggy Conklin, Charles Dow Clark, Blanche Sweet Walter Vonnegut, Robert Porterfield, Robert Hudson, and John Alexander. At the Broadhurst Theatre. Opened January 7, 1935.
Backstage With Actors
by Helen Ormsbee, 1938
Pauline Lord and Leslie Howard are two players whose acting gains poignancy through a knack of getting their speeches to convey more than is actually set down in the words. Their simplest phrases seem to carry with them an obbligato of ideas and memories which must inevitably be in the character's mind at that moment; and this is done so unobtrusively that the listener is touched on the quick before he knows it.
Leslie Howard, born in England in 1893 and educated there, never went on the stage until after he had served in the trenches during the World War and had been severely wounded. Anyone who meets him is bound to wonder how someone so gentle endured the brutalities of battle. But truth does not always follow the pattern of fiction. The war did not wreck Mr. Howard. Here he is, blond and rather slender, with keen, near-sighted blue eyes.
He is adventurous and many-sided. He makes nothing of flying between New York and Hollywood for a weekend. He has written and staged his own comedies, and he directs most of the productions in which he stars. In acting, he is always ready to attempt new things.
When he was an undergraduate at Dulwich College, near London, he wrote for the student dramatic organization. "At that time, I thought I could never make an actor; I was too self-conscious," he said to me. And he added that everything he had done in the theatre had been in spite of this handicap.
Here is an instance of a defect translating itself into a virtue. Howard had to find a way around his obstacle. So his acting came to be done in the manner of a person who might draw you aside from everybody else and tell you, in a casual undertone, the most unexpectedly moving things. Even a plain statement like, "I was born in Oshkosh," would gain significance by being related for your ear alone.
So, in "The Petrified Forest," Howard revealed the history of the part he played. He was a tragic, romantic figure—a gentleman down-and-outer, unfolding little by little all the influences which had brought him to this hopeless pass. It was all done sotto-voce. The man viewed his own disintegration with too much detachment for any outburst. The clue to Leslie Howard's delineation was his never forgetting things that had happened long before the play began.
(This saturation with antecedent events was also true of his Hamlet.)
In the Sherwood play, Howard purported to be living merely the last few hours of a wayfarer's life, but he let you in on the whole of it. How did he do it? By behaving as a person would behave who was thinking of the years that had gone. Here was faithfulness to the passing moment—present action being shaped by preceding causes. Without it, the onlooker would have seen nothing more than a man stepping into a lunchroom in the Arizona desert, meeting a girl, and quixotically letting himself be killed for her. That would have impoverished the author's idea, which provided the man with a past that made his course believable.
The actor knew this. He not only presented the character, but also conveyed a sense of larger meaning behind it. He gave it illumination. Illumination was of course achieved by actors long ago, but their method was usually a more outspoken one. They could take the audience by storm. With Howard, the audience does not know it has surrendered until everything is over. Anyone who wishes to study understatement should watch Mr. Howard. His is, of course, deliberate understatement backed by all the resources of a trained craftsman. Without them, the process would be ineffective.
He made his stage debut in a touring company in England, in 1917. Coming to New York in 1920 under Henry Miller's management, he had no less than fourteen Broadway roles between then and 1926—and yet he attracted little notice. His opportunity arrived in "Her Cardboard Lover" with Jeanne Eagels, in 1927. Since then the world has been his oyster.
A player so greatly in demand as Leslie Howard can choose the attractions in which he appears. This he does, giving part of his time to the cinema and reserving the rest for stage work, because he likes it best and feels the need of it.
"In acting for pictures you have to depend on memories of how an audience responds," he told me. "After a while those memories grow blurred—and then you must come back to the theatre, which is the greatest corrective of an actor's work. In pictures, it is the director who counts; in the theatre, it is the actor. The performance is in his hands. While the curtain is up, there are only two elements—the player and the audience. Nothing gets between them. Somewhere out there beyond the proscenium, they meet."
It was after a rehearsal, standing on the stage and looking out into an empty auditorium, that he said this. He is familiar with those currents which are sent out by the player and which encounter a returning surge. The demagogue or the Holy Rollers stimulate such currents to an unmeasured degree, but an artist of the theatre can both rouse and restrain them.
When Howard talks he is clear and deft at putting his thoughts into words, even though his manner has moments of diffidence. Seeing it, one believes the tradition of Edwin Booth's shyness.
"Imagination is requisite in the actor, but I wouldn't say that even that is his greatest quality," Mr. Howard insisted. "Something more is needed—that something which makes him or her different from anybody else in the world. We might call this thing personality—the individual's way of looking at life. That is the greatest thing of all. I am not one of those who think the actor should be a mere receptive substance for his part. There is something that he must give."
The word "personality" has been used often enough as a reproach to players, assuming it to be nothing more than a collection of identifying mannerisms. But here is a definition that goes deeper. A character viewed through the performer's eyes and colored by his way of looking at life—that is Leslie Howard's idea of acting. In this, his opinion agrees with Walt Whitman's that it is something special to the individual which always conquers.
One of the many pleasant features of Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest* is that—in the best Pauline manner—it has been made to mean all things to all men. It is perfectly possible to enjoy it as the fantastic and very exciting and amusing melodrama it is, and to take, at its own story-telling worth, the tale it so adroitly unfolds about a literary panhandler who in the course of his wanderings falls in love with the waitress in the lunchroom of an Arizona gasoline station and is suddenly involved with a famous killer and his gang.
Pauline Lord and Leslie Howard are two players whose acting gains poignancy through a knack of getting their speeches to convey more than is actually set down in the words. Their simplest phrases seem to carry with them an obbligato of ideas and memories which must inevitably be in the character's mind at that moment; and this is done so unobtrusively that the listener is touched on the quick before he knows it.
