The New Pictures

Simba. In Hollywood, animal pictures are held by the higher actors and actresses in some disdain. It is not considered utterly artistic to be cast opposite an ele- phant, or a cassowary or even that mental giant of cinema artists, the police dog, But Mr. & Mrs. Martin Johnson, not essentially cinema performers, are free from the prejudice. Their actors are all animals, wild, and photographed in their native state in Africa. Mr. Johnson is a wanderer of some eminence, having at an earlier date been associated with Jack London on the cruise of the Snark in the role of cook & bottle washer. Later he acquired a wife and a taste for photography. For his latest film he went through British East Africa with wife and camera. Four years ago Mr. & Mrs. Johnson established themselves in the jungle, set up their picture takers, and invited the animals to "see the birdie." Their reels reveal that alligators, elephants, wild-beasts, ostriches, zebras, water buffalo, giraffes, antelopes, and lions saw the birdie. Close-ups of these various beasts in their natural state required superhuman patience, stubborn tenacity, certain courage. Parents who take their children to the zoo will be unconscionably delinquent if they do not take them to Simba, Parents will themselves be surprised, delighted, often amazed.-- Simba is the native term for lion. The native hunt for this king of beasts in which black men, defenseless save for shield and spear, commit a bloody regicide serves as a gruelling climax. The Drums of Love. Lovers long ago defeated in their love have brightened many a story with golden shadows of a picturesque despair. Now, under a title which is highly absurd and which has reference to nothing except the box-offices of small-town theatres, with a background of South American rather than Italian roads and castles, is told the medieval legend of Paolo and Francesca. A huge, hunchbacked, hirsute grandee marries a small and beautiful lady who loves his handsome brother. When the hunchback goes away to war, love for each other overcomes pity and discretion in the wife and brother. Told, by a villainous clown, of their misconduct, the hunchback gallops home to make sure the story is a lie. He arrives in time to find brother and wife languishing tearfully in each other's arms. When they refuse to deny their guilt, the hunchback reluctantly stabs them both to death.

This brief plot is motivated, behind its glitter of extravagant romance, by true and human emotions. Lionel Barrymore, onetime stage actor, is able to indicate the burly pathos of the hunchback who loves his brother as much as he does his wife but can forgive neither of them for their sin. Mary Philbin, garbed in tight and tenuous garments, is almost equally competent to express her perplexity in the choice between loyalty and passion. The younger brother to the hunchback is a handsome cinemactor of Valentinoesque appearance; his name is Don Alvarado.

It is the habit of Director David Lew-elyn Wark Griffith to sentimentalize his sound themes, to intensify the subtlety of a straightforward situation by allowing the lens of his camera to point for long and frequent intervals at the almost im mobile face of one of his characters. This he does under the name of art; its effect upon the cinema is most unhealthy, be cause it prevents the plot from achieving a proper momentum. Aside from this foible, Director Griffith is consistently aware of his story's potentialities. His photography is always dextrous, at times brilliantly effective. Director Griffith was accustomed to lie under a dining room table, in La Grange, Ky., listening to the stories which his father, a Colonel, would read aloud by the light of a lone, economical candle. Later be became reporter, playwright, saw a movie in a nickel theatre. His first connection with the cinema was that of an actor; he used later to direct Mary Pickford or Mack Sennett, making a picture a day. According to tradition, it was D. W. Griffith who suggested that cinemas be lengthened to two reels, who invented the closeup, who enlarged the scope of the camera beyond that of the human eye. His The Birth of a Nation was perhaps the first picture which approached the potentialities of the cinema. Others, a list which betray D. W. Griffith's highly disputable flair for titles, are: Hearts of the World; Broken Blossoms; Orphans of the Storm; America. Beau Sabreur. Two novels, both best sellers, both written by Captain Percival Christopher Wren, both somewhat similar in title, have been translated into cinema by the Paramount Co. The first was Beau Geste. The second, in no wise a sequel, is Beau Sabreur, which is nobody's name but a phrase applied to Major Beaujolais, the hero, because he is handy with a sword.

He is so handy with a sword that when a fat old sheik, bargaining over a contract with the French Government, suggests a clause which will present him with the possession of a beautiful American woman, Major Beaujolais dares to refuse with equable asperity. Then there are several reels of sharp sabre-play, sand, and mine explosions. Lastly, the old sheik accepts a contract which omits the tur-pitudinous Santa clause; the lady properly rewards her sabreur.

The cast includes many incongruous but no unsuccessful impersonations. Noah Beery is the lascivious old sheik, and highly satisfactory as such. Evelyn Brent, who plays opposite Emil Jannings in The Last Command (TIME, Jan. 30), does well indeed as the somewhat helpless heroine. Gary Cooper is lanky and effective as the able Major Henri de Beaujolais. The sand of the desert, a by no means unimportant element, is seen to fine effect, either snapping its angry yellow veil in the windy darkness, puffing smokily into the air after an explosion, or merely lying still under the sun like a quilt of shining yellow snow.

Sharp Shooters. Those film-followers who have seen, in prim Cinemactress Lois Moran, a small blonde embodiment of all that a good girl should be, may well be surprised now to see her impersonating, with much undue undulation, a French girl who dances in a Moroccan port-town public house. Behind her, one catches a glimpse of the entire U. S. Navy, but especially of one roustabout bluejacket to whom Actor George O'Brien has given his first name and a good characterization. A mere word, spoken in jest by this gay and murderous tar, persuades the dancing girl to visit Manhattan, where she is last seen, in the midst of her loose and double jointed motions. She has already performed matrimony on the sailor.

One more reversal of that familiar proverb, the gobs will get you if you don't watch out, Sharp Shooters, while it becomes at times a trifle dirty, is straightforward, adventurous and, even in the subtitles, comparatively witty.

Come to My House. Olive Borden, a synthetic star at best, is herein tangled in elaborately scanty clothes and in the wiles of a blackmailer who has seen her entering the house of a presumably dissolute male friend. The male friend kills the blackmailer and is saved from the iron hand of the law when the heroine confesses her visitation. The invitation in the title should be declined by highly discriminating cine-maddicts.

*Produced by Daniel Eleazer Pomeroy, famed financier, director Bankers Trust Co., Loew's, Inc., Hamburg-American Line, etc. Witnesses of the Manhattan opening were amazed that so able a man should permit the dull, shoddy, blunderingly elaborate prologue which prefaced the principal film.