Cinema: The New Pictures Feb. 3, 1930

The Locked Door (United Artists). When you discover that the door in question was distinguished from other doors on the corridor by the words “Do Not Disturb” you will realize, if you have not already learned it from the masthead, that this piece is an adaptation of “The Sign On the Door,” a melodrama that has been aliment for road-shows for a decade or two. It is a problem play, the chief problem for skeptical spectators being whether or not the door of an ordinary hotel-apartment can be locked from the outside so that the person inside cannot get out. Good and Evil, shut up there, wait discovery by the law—Good personified by beautiful innocent Barbara Stanwyck, Evil by the bullet-riddled body of saturnine Rod La Rocque. There is really nothing the matter with The Locked Door except that it is very old. Its antiquity has stimulated Director George Fitzmaurice to invent, by way of disguise, some effective modern sets. Best shot: the floating cabaret outside the twelve-mile limit, peopled by police spies and surrounded by well-drilled policemen in speedboats.

Across the World with Mr. & Mrs. Martin Johnson (Epics). In a drawing-room full of people in evening clothes a dowager says: “Oh, tell us about your trip.” A sandy-haired man starts answering her verbally, shows a cinema as he talks. At intervals the lights in the drawing-room are turned on. The narrative is broken with comments or explanations. Out of this simple framework is projected onto the little screen in the drawing-room—and onto the great screen in the theatres—as exciting a travel picture as ever was made.

Mr. & Mrs. Martin Johnson have made many a film about wild places. Their most famed was Simba, a lion story that lost some interest because of its specialization. Now the Johnsons point their telescopic lenses at a variety of things. They start in the Solomon Islands, watching the cowardly headhunters launching a war-canoe inlaid with mother-of-pearl. In the New Hebrides a tribe is burying some old men alive; in the Big Numbers Territory some monkey men with prehensile feet peer wildly out of the trees. The Johnsons gave a movie show of Charlie Chaplin for King Nagapate’s cannibals in the Big Numbers Territory, next day went inland to see the cannibal village. No longer friendly, Nagapate’s men seized them and were getting ready to eat them when, in the manner long familiar to adventure fiction, a British man-of-war on regular tour-of-inspection swung into the harbor, lowered a boat.

Leaving the South Seas, the Johnsons reached the Indian Ocean, crossed to Alexandria, went up to the Victoria Nile. Animals now replace the twisted faces of man-eating men. Driven by drought, a procession of game in stretched, incredible battalions passes the tents on the Serengetti plains—first zebras, then hartebeests, buck, cheetahs, gazelles, giraffes, rhinos, wild dogs, all superbly photographed. They stand out in relief as clearly as if they were posed in a studio.

Lions, elephants and hippos are photographed charging at attractive little Mrs. Johnson and her steady gun. The only silly shots concern some Boy Scouts who join the party for no apparent reason. Best shot; a lion who makes himself look like the lions in Trafalgar Square.

Martin Johnson, 45, ran away from his home in Independence, Kan., when he was 14. He worked for a while as bellhop in a Chicago hotel, worked his way East and then to Liverpool on a cattle boat. Coming back from England on a U. S. liner as a stowaway the next year, he read in an outdated magazine about the trip around the world in a 40-foot boat that Jack London was planning to take. London’s cook had quit. Johnson applied by letter for the job. London wired Johnson: “Can you cook? Salary $25 a month, also take trick at wheel.” To qualify, Johnson worked for a week in a restaurant. When the expedition broke up in the South Seas he lived on the beach for a year and learned photography from a stranded French cameraman.

Back in Kansas, he was given so much publicity for having been a member of London’s party that he found it easy to raise capital. He started a string of cinema theatres, married Osa Leighty of Chanute, lectured on South Sea life, edited cinema newsreels, then began explorations, taking pictures. When photographing dangerous animals, Mrs. Johnson, an expert shot, stands guard beside him. Once they spent 14 months cruising in a 30-ft. ketch with an engine so faulty that no one could sleep below on account of the fumes. Lashed to the hatch, they slept on deck through tropic storms. They say they spent one of the happiest times of their lives floating on a raft down a river in Borneo.

Last fall the Johnsons visited the U. S. but have now gone to the Itura forest in Africa to make sound-pictures of pygmies, of the jungle at night.