The Petrified Forest: A film not to be forgotten

The Petrified Forest, released in 1936, is a remarkably prescient film. After watching it this week for the first time, it instantly became one of my favourite films.

One of my reasons for recommending this film on Sementivae is because of, as I say, its prescience - specifically its prescience on matters of the environment.

Leslie Howard - who gives such a fantastic performance that I forgot I originally watched the film for the posthumously better-celebrated Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis - is the protagonist Alan Squier, an Englishman rambling in the Arizona desert, who meets and falls in love with Gabrielle Maple (Davis), a waitress at the cafe (and gas-station) found, geographically and metaphorically, on the edge of the expansive wilderness.

Their brief acquaintance is only allowed to deepen from passing infatuation into love when fate intervenes and escaped prisoner, sociopathic killer Duke Mantee (Bogart) and his fellow gangsters, take them hostage.

It's an excellent film with an engrossing set-up. It's a seminal gangster movie, it's a romantic movie, it has shades of noir, it is magnificently, wittily scripted and acted. For these reasons the film deserves more advocates, deserves to be remembered. But for those with a ripe environmental conscience, the film takes on another level of meaning. And all because of Leslie Howard's protagonist.

Alan Squier is a thoroughly modern man; he wishes to escape the rat-race which is how he wound up in Arizona. He is a man of capacious intellect who has never made productive use of it. He could have been a great writer, had he chosen to play the game.

His theory of modern existence, I say, is astute and even more relevant now than, arguably, back in the '30s.

That is, modern man is arrogant, he believes he can rule nature, that he can subject nature to his will. Modern man is winning the fight, but nature is fighting back. And nature's weapon of choice is neuroses. Nature is giving modern man neuroses.

How true. There is copious psychological literature that posits a correlation between modern society and a host of mental illnesses (schizophrenia, depression, stress, to name the most common), that it seems the more manufactured our world becomes the sicker we must become. This is Nature's way of informing us of our mistake of turning our back on her.

Modern society is too complex for man, it demands too much of his mental and physical resources. Rules, regulations and protocol of modern society are overabundant and it ruptures our self-identity and overworks our memory. How much of the self is left when one conforms to the protocols of an institution? How can one possibly remember all these overbearing rules and regulations?

Alan Squier is an enlightened, self-confident man (not in the macho way, but a virtue of his harmonious acceptance of the world), his wandering in the desert recall that of Buddha or Jesus. Squier is apolitical, his philosophy implicitly rejecting communism (that man cannot rule over nature) and, more explicitly, capitalism.

Drawing on the contemporary schools of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic thought, he is a physician by his assertion that Nature is fighting back with neuroses and thus cites the aetiology of modern man's illness.

I will conclude with an excerpt from Squier's quietly impassioned observations:

"And now do you realize what it is that is causing the world chaos? It's Nature hitting back. Not with the old weapons - floods, plagues, holocausts. We can neutralize them. She's fighting back with strange instruments called neuroses. She's deliberately afflicting mankind with the jitters. Nature is proving that she can't be beaten - not by the likes of us. She's taking the world away from the intellectuals and giving it back to the apes"