"The Petrified Forest." At the Tivoli
The Cinema
" DRAMATISE, dramatise." Those were the words which used to ring in James's ear whenever some anecdote at a dinner table touched his creative brain, but how seldom are they heard by even the most distinguished contemporary dramatists. Mr. Sherwood, for instance. . . I seldom go to the theatre, but even I have heard of Mr. Sherwood as a playwright of uncommon ability, and it was with great hope that I visited The Petrified Forest. The opening move- ment of his drama is very promising : the lonely filling station on the edge of the Arizona desert ; the old garrulous owner who had once been shot at for fun by Billy the Kid and had kept a soft place in his heart for killers ever since : his grand-daughter with her taste for poetry who .feels her .life drying up in the dust storms : her father, an officer in the vigilantes, trying to get excitement from his fake uniform and bogus drills : the huge dumb hired hand with his eyes on the girl : and then the arrival of the educated down- and-out, the girl's outbreak of sudden starved love, his departure with his food unpaid for and a dollar the girl had given him from the till, and finally disaster breaking in with a killer and his gang on the run froneOklahonia, and the down-and-out's deliberate return.
There is good dramatic material here, but Mr. Sherwood doesn't see his play as certain things happening but as ideas being expressed, " significant " cosmic ideas. As for the plot, the drama, these arc rather low-class necessities, like the adulteries in Mr. Charles Morgan's novels. The down- and-out, so that he may express the ideas, must be an un- successful author, the filling-station girl—to interest him— a painter of untrained talent, for whose Art he sacrifices his life (Mr. Sherwood is nothing if not literary). The hero leaves the girl his life-assurance money and then forces the killer to shoot him, though why, if he hadn't a cent in his pocket, was the life-assurance for five thousand dollars fully paid up, or if that be explainable, why had this homeless and friendless tramp not cashed it for its face value ? But first all through a long evening, with the sad simian killer (the best character in the play) sitting above with his beer and his pistol, the self-pitying post-War ideas have to be bandied about. " Dramatise, dramatise," one longs to remind Mr. Sherwood, as more and more the concrete fact— the gun, the desert, the killer—gives place to Life, Love, Nature, all the great stale abstractions. It is as if Othello had met the armed men outside his door not with " Put up your bright swords or the dew will rust them," but with some such sentence as : " Nature, my men, is having her revenge. You can't defeat Nature with your latest type of swords and daggers. She comes back every time in the shape of neuroses, jealousies . . ." and had let Desdemona and the affairs of Venice, Iago and the one particular hand- kerchief vanish before Woman, Life, Sex. . . .
So this drama slackens under the weight of Mr. Sherwood's rather half-baked philosophy. The moral is stated frequently, with the tombstone clarity of a leading article, when it ought to be implicit in every action, every natural spoken word, in the camera angles even (but this is not alilm but a canned play). There remain in this picture a few things to enjoy : the killer himself, with his conventional morality, his brooding hopelessness, his curious kindness, is memorable, but not so memorable nor so significant (the word which I am sure means most to Mr. Sherwood) as the murderer in Four Hours to Kill. That killer was a profound and legendary figure, this one the ingenious invention of a clever writer. Miss Bette Davies gives a sound performance, Mr. Leslie Howard faithfully underlines the self-pity and the bogus culture of a character embarrassing to us but obviously admired by his creator, and everyone works hard to try to give the illusion that the Whole of Life is symbolised in the Arizona filling-station. But life itself, which crept in during the opening scene, embarrassed perhaps at hearing itself so explicitly discussed, crept out again, leaving us only with the symbols, the too pasteboard desert, the stunted cardboard
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