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
James Cagney gun bullets (a common practice in the Hollywood of the time), Cagney refused and insisted the shots be added afterwards. As it turned out, a ricocheting bullet passed through exactly where his head would have been. During his first year back at Warner Bros., Cagney became the studio's highest earner, making $324,000. He completed his first decade of movie-making in 1939 with "The Roaring Twenties", his first film with Raoul Walsh and his last with Bogart. After "The Roaring Twenties", it would be a decade before Cagney made another gangster film. Cagney again received good reviews; Graham Greene stated, "Mr.