One of the greater challenges for a film director in handling an adaptation of a staged-bound play with a low budget is to make it exciting. But director Howard Hawks proved he could take a story originally constricted to the stage and create a barn burner of a adventure film in January 1936's "Ceiling Zero." The director was helped by the vibrancy of James Cagney and Pat O'Brien, both fast talkers delivering their rapid fire dialogue, so typical of a Hawks' film. "There's a close, emotionally heavy, mano a mano sense to scenes," writes film reviewer Erick Lundegard, describing Hawks' trademark features. "It's a melodrama, truncated in time and space, and with a low budget."
Hawks had a love affair with aviation films. He was an instructor for Signal Corps pilots during World War One, inspiring him to produce flyboy movies such as 1928 'Air Circus,' 1930 "The Dawn Patrol," and 1939 "Only Angels Have Wings," his last one containing similar storylines as "Ceiling Zero." Scriptwriter Frank 'Spig' Wead, also a WW1 aviator, wrote both the play of the same name as well as the script. Wead, an inventor for several airplane innovations, turned to writing when he became paralyzed falling down stairs while responding to his daughter's crying. The John Wayne movie, 1957's "The Wings of Eagles," directed by John Ford, is a biopic on Wead, who was good friends with the director.
Wead addressed two themes in "Ceiling Zero." Set in the year 1930, the movie focuses on the younger, yet vastly inexperienced pilots vying against the much older WW1 vets for aviator jobs. Dizzy Davis (James Cagney) and Tex Clarke (Stuart Erwin) are a pair of daredevil war pilots who fly in any type of weather, including ceiling zero, where visibility is nil. The younger pilots are skittish about the weather, as exhibited by one tenderfoot who abandons his plane when he can't see his hand in front of his face.
The secondary theme is the introduction of a novel form of deicing an airplane in flight when freezing rain, snow or drizzle dangerously forms ice on the airplane. Mixed in with all this excitement is cinema's proverbial romantic angle, which includes Jack Lee (O'Brien), who's the Newark, N. J. branch manager for Federal Airlines and a young female pilot "Tommy" Thomas (June Travis). Famous aviator Amelia Earhart gave lessons in flying, navigating and parachute jumping to Travis as well as to Cagney and O'Brien before the production in preparation for the film. Close to 70 per cent of the shots takes place in Jack's dispatcher office (filming never left the Warner Brother's studio and backlot.). Hawks's ability to create such a thrilling aviation film, all without computerized blue screens, was a talent very few movie directors in his day were capable of matching.
