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 period was in "Dead End" (1937), while loaned to Samuel Goldwyn, where he portrayed a gangster modeled after Baby Face Nelson. Bogart played violent roles so often that in Nevil Shute's 1939 novel "What Happened to the Corbetts" the protagonist, when asked whether he knows how to operate an automatic weapon, jokes "I've seen Humphrey Bogart with one often enough ...". He did play a variety of interesting supporting roles, such as in "Angels with Dirty Faces" (1938) (in which his character got shot by James Cagney's). Bogart was gunned down on film repeatedly by Cagney and Edward G. Robinson,