Petrified Forest
Directed by Archie MayoIn a roadside diner at the edge of the Arizona Petrified Forest, Gabrielle Maple – called Gabby – serves gas and hamburgers while nursing ambitions of escaping to France and becoming a painter. Her father Jason runs the place with quiet resignation; her grandfather Gramp romanticizes a frontier West that no longer exists. Into this stranded outpost walks Alan Squier, a failed English writer hitchhiking west with nothing left to lose, who recognizes in Gabby an intelligence and longing that the desert has not yet extinguished.
The arrival of Duke Mantee – a fugitive killer modeled loosely on John Dillinger, accompanied by his armed gang – transforms the diner into a hostage situation. Mantee is waiting for a woman, and while he waits, the assembled captives – a wealthy couple, a former football player besotted with Gabby, and the drifter Squier – are forced into proximity with violence and their own self-deceptions. Squier, who has already decided he is worth nothing to the world, sees in Mantee's brutal clarity a kind of liberty, and the two men arrive at a strange, oblique understanding across the barrel of a gun.
The film occupies an early position in the noir genealogy, predating the movement's full flowering yet rehearsing many of its defining preoccupations: the man who courts his own destruction, the woman trapped between aspiration and circumstance, and the criminal who functions less as villain than as catalyst. Adapted from Robert E. Sherwood's stage play, it retains the theatrical confinement of its source while using the desert landscape – ancient, petrified, indifferent – as a moral geography that the camera never lets the audience forget.
