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The Petrified Forest (1935)

Film details

Synopsis

Poet Alan Squier wandering across the country becomes embroiled in a murderer and his gang holding up a small gas-station in the desert in Arizona. Alan is given a lift with the Chisholms, but they are held up by escaped killer Duke Mantee, and members of his gang, who take the car. They return on foot to the gas-station they visisted earlier, where Alan previously encountered Gabrielle Maple, a waitress who was also an intellectual and shared his love of art and poetry. She and her family are being held hostage by Mantee while he awaits the arrival of his girlfriend in a car. A relationship develops between Alan and Gabrielle and in order for her to realise her ambitions to travel and develop unhindered by family and financial restrictions, Alan bequeaths all he has in a will to her and persuades Mantee to shoot him before the gangster moves on across the border to Mexico.

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