When Wead turned in his 142-page first-draft screenplay, it included an excruciating final sequence after Dizzy’s death depicting an official ceremony at which the president of the Flying League of America awards a medal to Jake in Dizzy’s honor and sanctimoniously praises the late flier for his pioneering
with deicers. In fact, Warner Bros. was quite concerned about reactions from the airline industry. Five months before the film went into production, United Airlines expressed its displeasure with the play (which included explicitly disparaging remarks about the company) and the proposed film and suggested that the action of the piece be put back in time by ten years to reassure viewers that flying
was not as precarious as it appeared in
Ceiling Zero
. The Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America wrote a letter to Will Hays, insisting, “The air lines do not employ pilots like ‘Dizzy’ in the play,” and requesting that the film carry an introduction reassuring viewers that contemporary airlines “are operated in a business-like manner.” This demand was agreed to, and Hawks personally played
a big part in placating nervous aviation officials, even using by-then obsolete single-engine mail planes—a Northrop Gamma with an F-3 cyclone motor and F-50 cylinders—for the crash sequences.
Wead and Hawks continued to add more technical flying jargon to the script, but there was general agreement among Hawks, Harry Joe Brown,
and Wallis that the love scenes were too repetitious and that the
whole thing needed more humor, so Hawks brought in Morrie Ryskind for two weeks to work with Wead. The script was improved enormously in the process. Ryskind, the Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of
Of Thee I Sing
and a frequent writer for the Marx Brothers, was so ignorant of aviation that when his agent, Zeppo Marx, first told him about the assignment, he thought the title was
Sealing Zero
. His
job was to “concentrate on injecting some humor into the human element of the story.” But he was also asked to stretch the story out without making it seem padded, since Hawks planned to have the actors speak the dialogue at twice the normal speed. As Ryskind recalled it, Hawks said the average rate of dialogue delivery was 150 words per minute, which works out to about one page of script per minute.
Therefore, no one was too alarmed when the final screenplay came out to 168 pages. There was some talk of Ryskind receiving cowriting credit, but Wead was furious at the prospect and Ryskind himself agreed that the playwright deserved solo recognition.
As for the cast, Cagney and O’Brien were a lock, but the other roles offered plum possibilities. For Texas, Hawks tested G. Albert Smith, who
had played the part on Broadway, but finally borrowed Stuart Erwin from MGM; ironically, Erwin had replaced Lee Tracy in
Viva Villa!
but had not worked with Hawks, while Isabel Jewell, who was cast as Erwin’s henpecking wife, was Tracy’s girlfriend at the time. Hawks wanted Ann Dvorak to play Mary, but the role was too inconsequential for her, and it went to Martha Tibbetts. Most important, however,
was the role of Tommy. Since the character is supposed to be nineteen and impressionable, it was a perfect part for a newcomer, and Wallis had one in mind: June Dorothea Grabiner, a lovely black-haired, green-eyed young woman Wallis and his wife had noticed at their hotel in Santa Barbara. Hawks agreed on her potential, and the role was hers.
With the Warners New York office very anxious for
the picture, Wallis pressed for the film to start production quickly. But, in an unusual move, he granted Hawks four days of rehearsal. As one of the executive lieutenants noted, “Personally, I think with a man like Hawks, the more rehearsal time we can give him, the less time it will take when we start shooting. You know how
slow
Hawks works.” The rehearsals no doubt helped, but they weren’t
enough to calm Wallis. Filming began on October 7, and within two days Wallis was fit to be tied. In his opinion, Hawks had only accomplished a half day’s work in that time, and Pat O’Brien was “barking too much.” Wallis was also dismayed that the massive shooting script hadn’t
been cut down further, although Harry Joe Brown rightly defended Hawks on this issue, pointing out that the dialogue
was being played so fast that the running time would not be a problem. By the third day Wallis was even closer to a coronary, determining that what other directors accomplished in three hours Hawks took a full day to do. The very next day, Wallis received a stern missive from Joseph I. Breen of the Hays Office urging that the characterization of Dizzy as “an habitual seducer who cheerfully deserted
his victims” be toned down as much as possible, that the idea that he intends to commit suicide on his final flight be eliminated, and that the film omit any suggestion that Mary used to be Dizzy’s mistress—only the three most important plot points in the entire picture!
After a week of shooting, Wallis could no longer contain himself and fired off a memo that explains much about what drove him
so mad about Hawks’s methods, both on this picture and in the future:
Hawks is getting next to nothing in his dailies. I just finished looking at Saturday’s stuff, and there are a couple of close-ups of Buzz at his desk, and one little scene outside of about thirty seconds, and that’s the day’s work. I can’t understand how it is possible to get so little work done.…
I find that Hawks was on
the inside, in the office, and shot the close-ups of the boy at the radio desk, and then went out—in order to stay in continuity he made a complete move to the outside of the office, shooting in, and this probably took four or five hours. There was no reason at all for doing this. He could have shot out of continuity and stayed on the interior and skipped it, and then picked up this outside sequence
when he moved outside.… In any event, let’s prevent him from doing it in the future.
Within several days, Hawks had gotten up to speed, and Wallis began to see that the results were good. It is possible that a few more days’ rehearsal would have prevented the bumpy takeoff, but Hawks’s methods of slowly working out the mechanics and timing of a scene, of honing character interplay, of rewriting
on the set, of giving his leads a long leash to pursue flights of fancy of their own, of calling impromptu cast-and-crew conferences to see if anyone had any better ideas of how to play a scene, and of generally taking his time to ensure the best possible results ran completely contrary to the values of a man to whom counting the days and dollars was of primary importance.
Happy to be working
on such congenial material and with such a spirited company of actors, Hawks established a loose, freewheeling atmosphere on the set, and except for the irksome specter of Wallis looming over it, he had a grand time making
Ceiling Zero
. Although most of the flying sequences used miniatures filmed in the studio or made do with phony cockpit mock-ups, the stunts of Dizzy buzzing the airfield upside
down were done by the Hollywood ace stunt pilot Paul Mantz. At home one morning, Hawks asked his six-year-old son David, “How would you like to fly upside down?” and took him to the shoot for a memorable spin with Mantz. Amelia Earhart was briefly around as an unofficial consultant and took Meta Carpenter, who held script on the picture, on a ride over Los Angeles. Cagney was in a feisty mood
and showed up on the set having grown a little mustache, probably to make himself look a bit older but possibly also to tweak the noses of the Warner Bros. executives, with whom he was feuding. This was to be Cagney’s last picture for the studio before his walkout, which saw him make two pictures at Grand National before returning to Warners with a more favorable deal.
Cutting as it went,
Ceiling
Zero
was finished in six weeks at a total cost of only $375,000. To show how the studio fixed things in its favor, however, 31 percent of this sum, or $116,250, represented studio overhead, charged alike to all films, while depreciation accounted for another 4 percent, meaning that the total direct cost was only $243,950, including $30,500 for Cagney and $16,000 for O’Brien. On December 19, just
over two months from the time it started shooting, it had a successful sneak preview, then opened on January 16 in New York to strong reviews and good business.
With the exceptions of
Scarface
and, for many people,
Twentieth Century, Ceiling Zero
today plays as the most strictly entertaining film Hawks made up to that point in his career. Cagney’s performance as Dizzy is dazzling, even audacious,
brimming with bantam cock effrontery and a knowing, even lewd sexuality unmatched in any of his other films. He’s given an entrance that would be hard to beat: after having been introduced over the radio with his irreverent patter, as well as with his friend Jake’s buildup as “the best cock-eyed pilot on this airline or any other,” Dizzy buzzes the field upside down, lands, and, upon jumping
out of his cockpit, is affectionately tossed around like a human beanbag by all his cronies before landing in a heap on the tarmac at the feet of a disapproving federal inspector. The way O’Brien snaps out his dialogue, it’s as if he stepped right out of
The Front Page
, even down to his character; his Jake Lee is Hildy Johnson as if he had quit working as a reporter and settled down with his wife
and a city-desk
editorial job. And June Travis (née Grabiner), as Tommy, could not be more appealing, making a striking entrance enthusiastically emerging from her plane after soloing, garbed—in what would become preferred Hawks fashion—in a pilot’s uniform and an adapted Haile Selassie helmet. In very fast company, she holds her own with poise and humor, batting the come-ons back at Dizzy as
quickly as he tosses them out. Along with Carole Lombard in
Twentieth Century
, she is the most self-sufficient, sexy, and forthright woman in Hawks’s films to that time. It was to remain her career highlight, however, as she got stuck mainly with B pictures for the remainder of the 1930s, before concentrating on the stage.
In nearly a dozen ways Hawks’s handling of the material in
Ceiling Zero
prefigures his more extensive treatment of recurring themes and situations in his later work. In more than a third of his subsequent films, Hawks would constrict the action to a limited physical space, a safe haven threatened by unpredictable elements trying to intrude from the outside. In
Ceiling Zero
, the impression of a rarefied, almost abstracted world in which philosophy is expressed through
action is intensified by the flat, almost B-movie-fake sets; the impact of the characters’ behavior, along with its thematic resonance, would be much different in a hyperrealistic setting. The machine-gun, overlapping dialogue direction, which Hawks initiated in
Twentieth Century
, is cranked up even more here, would reach its zenith in
His Girl Friday
, and would continue to be used judiciously
throughout his career. The theme of competition between men, used initially in
A Girl in Every Port
, resurfaces here and would remain a thread through many later films. But the way he uses the “girl he used to go with” motif here, in the context of the friendship between Jake and Dizzy, echoes
The Dawn Patrol
and directly foreshadows the much more prominent use of the same situation in
Only Angels
Have Wings
.
The vibrancy, casualness, and directness of the romance between Dizzy and Tommy provides a model for many that were to come in Hawks’s films thereafter. Although the frank elements of the male-female relations in
Scarface, The Crowd Roars, Tiger Shark, Barbary Coast
, and even
Today We Live
give indications of Hawks’s preference for keeping the sexual current close to the surface,
it’s as if
Ceiling Zero
helped teach him that he could push his characters to be considerably more suggestive and insolent, lessons that had their payoff specifically in the Bogart-Bacall films, but in others as well. As usual, there is the refusal to yield to the expected Hollywood sentimentality and mawkishness; Hawks liked his characters, men and women, to be available and ready to spark when
the fuse was lit, and characters
settled into marriage and domesticity continued to be pushed further into the margins, or eliminated altogether (witness how the portrait of Jake’s marriage is painted with one quick, isolated scene of him and Mary sitting at home playing backgammon).
Hawks’s preoccupation with crippling, disabling injury is placed front and center with the character of Mike,
a pathetic walking reminder of what might befall any pilot who survives a crash. Hawks’s fondness for the graceful but loaded physical gesture is present here in the exchanges of cigarettes and the small, unspoken things the characters do for one another, although such business would be elaborated far more extensively in later films, from
Only Angels Have Wings
and
To Have and Have Not
to
Rio
Bravo
and
Hatari!
The specific incident of Texas’s fatal landing in inclement weather is repeated in Joe’s crash in
Only Angels Have Wings
, as is the stoic reaction to sudden death and deprivation. For Jake, the climax of
Ceiling Zero
surely must qualify as the most tragic day of his life, in that his two closest friends, Dizzy and Texas, are both killed in plane crashes. But after only the briefest
of moments, Jake pulls himself together and buries his sorrow in his work rather than indulging it. Again, this instinctive stoicism, borne by many of the World War I generation though more evident in Hawks’s work than in that of any other American director, was more eloquently and completely expressed later on but is squarely on display here, and not enshrouded in an alcoholic fog as it was
in
The Dawn Patrol
and
Today We Live
.
Dizzy’s plunge to earth after deliberately allowing his plane’s wings to encrust with ice represents yet another explicitly suicidal ending in Hawks’s work, a precedent set in
The Dawn Patrol
. But his next picture would mark the last of these, and Hawks later expressed his disapproval of suicide as the coward’s way out of problems, and a simplistic and dramatically
expedient way to conclude complicated, high-pressure scenarios. Beyond this, as he increasingly dealt with characters that he personally liked, he didn’t want to knock them off. Keeping characters alive was also an astute commercial move. Hawks deliberately allowed Harry Morgan to live in
To Have and Have Not
though Hemingway had not, and what promises to be an unavoidably murderous finale in
Red River
is averted. And, wartime allegiances to the side,
Ceiling Zero
contains as specific an expression of Hawks’s (and no doubt Wead’s) political sentiments as can be found anywhere: with the threat of ever heavier government regulation cramping Jake’s style in the way he runs the airline, Jake remarks that he just wants Washington “to leave us alone.”