New Plays in Manhattan

Happy Landing, Well aware of the risks, skill, and courage involved in flying, some theatregoers may be embarrassed to hear a group of greasepainted actors chatter knowingly about "low ceilings," "take offs'' and "happy landings." That argot, one somehow feels, should be indulged in only by the aviation fraternity if & when it chooses.

Happy Landing has to do with a young man, not unlike Charles Augustus Lindbergh, who sets out on a transpacific flight. Just to make it more difficult, the playwrights have the journey begin at Old Orchard, Me. That such a feat could be accomplished without refueling is explained by having the heroine (Margaret Sullavan). mention "the new carburetor" with which the ship is equipped. When the youth gets back home he is, of course, a national hero. He lunches with the President, is made a colonel in the reserve flying corps and runs into a rich and comely lion-hunter (Catherine Dale Owen), not a bit like Anne Morrow. It looks for a time as though the valiant aeronaut were guilty of treachery to the girl back home, who had sacrificed some property to finance the exploit. But in the end--you've guessed it--he renounces "the hero racket" over the radio, returns quite chastened to his native Maine, his twangy rustic cronies and his girl.

A half-dozen recent debunking farces about heroes, press-agents and high officialdom echo through Happy Landings, but several sequences--notably the one in which the 'leggers and the Moca-loca magnate get the hero to endorse Prohibition-- engender good-humored laughter.

Rapidly approaching its close, this theatrical season has been notable for the number of motion picture people whom Broadway has attracted to its boards. Such a person is Miss Catherine Dale Owen, the raspy-voiced, jonquil-haired socialite charmer in Happy Landing. Usually associated with film work, Miss Owen made her first success in the entertainment business with her appearance on Broadway in The Whole Town's Talking. Afterward she went to Hollywood, played opposite John Gilbert in His Glorious Night, with Lawrence Tibbett in The Rogue Song, with Levis Stone in Strictly Unconventional. She announces as the reason for turning her back on the Golden Calf of Hollywood a need to "help her technique." Miss Owen is not alone among oldtime film folk, some definitely shelved by film producers, who have gone to Broadway this year to help their techniques and, as Baseball Manager "Gabby" Street would say, for the profit, too. Some of the renegades have done better than others. Miss Pauline Starke's frightening Zombie was shortlived on Broadway (but is currently a fair success in Chicago). Miss Raquel Torres did not get a great deal of stage experience out of her brief connection with Adam Had Two Sons. Pauline Frederick, after an absence of eight years in pictures and in English and Australian productions, was given an unfortunate re-debut in When the Bow Breaks.

On the other hand, Lois Moran topped a middling success in last season's This is New York with an appearance in the smash-hit Of Thee I Sing. Charles ("Buddy") Rogers, and, to a far greater degree, Lupe Velez, are currently enjoying a profitable association with Florenz Ziegfeld in his ornamental Hot-cha! An old leading man of Miss Moran's, Lawrence Gray, lent a dignified if uncertain grace to The Laugh Parade about the same time that Fay Wray starred in a short engagement of her husband's strange musical mixture, Nikki. Life Begins (by Mary McDougal Axelson; Joseph Santley, producer). When Vina Delmar's Bad Girl was dramatized last season it contained one brief scene in which a childbirth was indicated by means of a shadowgraph. At the time this sequence was regarded as potent, somewhat daring. Life Begins, whose entire action takes place in and around a maternity ward of a city hospital, makes the high spot of Bad Girl seem like a Sunday School charade by comparison. One woman delivers a nine-pound infant, to the evident gratification of her none too virile spouse. An unmarried sinner leaps out of a window when she learns that her seducer has been packed off by his family to South America. In contrast, the independent lady who insists on being called "Miss" has come to the ward to bear eugenic, fatherless progeny. Others are a lady murderess, a psychopath, an Italian woman, a mother of six--blessedly quiet and collected about the whole business--a malingerer who wants the relief of an abortion. The affairs of this gallery of victims to nature run into each other, bump, skip and leap across two hours of pitiless, often nervously gay drama which should give a childless husband pause, possibly make him a little ill.

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