The Broadway that has been swallowing a lot of purposeful drama in the last few weeks, evidently decided it was time to take a holiday and an antidote, if we may be permitted to scramble a couple of metaphors.
The result—and an eminently pleasing one—was the play by Frank Wead, ex-U. S. Navy, called “Ceiling Zero,” at the very comfortable Music Box.
It’s melodrama pure and simple, brimming over with excitement of the sort that is not to be recommended lightly to persons with jumpy hearts.
“Ceiling Zero” is a play about steel that flies in the sky. Steel that flies—and crashes—through fog and sleet and all other tough weather that is lumped under the air term of “cold front.” That crashes with its burden of mail and flesh and bones.
On the screen, the audience is given the thrill of seeing airplane crashes before its very eyes. On the Music Box stage, the catastrophes are conveyed by sound effect, by anguished men and women clenching hands, pacing madly up and down the boards. Sometimes, it seems a bit overdone. It may sound like heresy—and it may be sacrilegious—but Osgood Perkins in the role of Jake Lee, the man who makes the Federal Air Lines wheels go around as superintendent, does a bit too much handwringing and brow-mopping to convey the depth of his emotion as his bosom pals come to grief. And Osgood Perkins used to be a swell actor. Maybe he still is.
Primarily, “Ceiling Zero” is a story of three daredevils, gallant flying men of the old school, who grew wings on their shoulders and scoffed at the new crop of aeronautical scientists who had them grafted on. One of the three musketeers of the air becomes superintendent of the company he pioneered for. The other two remain pilots. This and that happens and when the final curtain is rung down, the superintendent is left alone, his two buddies having met up with Mother Earth with dramatic suddenness.
It’s as simple and unassuming in plot as that, but it manages to be gripping and vital all the way. One of the best acting bits of the evening is contributed by John Littel as Dizzy Davis, one of the flying musketeers, a madcap in the air and the same with women. He’s good fun, even when he goes out against orders and flies into the dirty weather of the Alleghanies in a beau geste that is tantamount to suicide.
The audience Thursday night, the second night, enjoyed it hugely, to the last clutch at the throat. Even the silver-haired Bernard M. Baruch, who occupied one on the aisle in the fourth row, seemed quite happy about it. And if the man who has offended Huey Long and Father Coughlin because he happens to have made some money in his day and has been the confidante of Presidents, liked it, then there’s no reason why ordinary mortals who only have to listen to Huey and the radio priest shouldn’t be entertained.
—H. W.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
