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 among others. In "Black Legion" (1937), for a change, he played a good man caught up and destroyed by a racist organization, a movie Graham Greene described as "intelligent and exciting, if rather earnest". In 1938, Warner Bros. put Bogart in a "hillbilly musical" called "Swing Your Lady" as a wrestling promoter; he later apparently considered this his worst film performance. In 1939, Bogart played a mad scientist in "The Return of Doctor X", his only horror film. He cracked, "If it'd been Jack Warner's blood ... I wouldn't have minded so much. The trouble was they were drinking mine