Humphrey Bogart of the play, "a peach ... a roaring Western melodrama ... Humphrey Bogart does the best work of his career as an actor." Bogart said that the play "marked my deliverance from the ranks of the sleek, sybaritic, stiff-shirted, swallow-tailed 'smoothies' to which I seemed condemned to life." This, however, did not yet mean felt secure. Warner Bros. bought the screen rights to "The Petrified Forest". The play seemed perfect for the studio, which was famous for its socially realistic, urban, low-budget action pictures, especially for a public entranced by real-life criminals like John Dillinger (whom Bogart resembled) and Dutch
Humphrey Bogart three Academy Awards. After his death, a "Bogie Cult" formed at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York, and in France, which contributed to his spike in popularity in the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1997, "Entertainment Weekly" magazine named Bogart the number one movie legend of all time. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him the greatest male screen legend. Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" (1960) was the first film to pay tribute to Bogart. Later, in Woody Allen's comic paean to Bogart, "Play It Again, Sam" (1972), Bogart's ghost comes to the