Osa and Martin: for the Love of Adventure, is a dual biography of the Johnsons, Kelly Enright notes that at first their movies tended to reflect the era in which they flourished (the 1920s to the ’40s): Big-game animals and indigenous people. As time went on, however, the couple realized how much they owed to information supplied by “natives†and changed their attitudes toward wild animals.
Having often cheated death in the African bush, Martin Johnson was killed in the crash of a commercial airliner in the United States. Osa was with him at the time. She survived the crash, but her last years were overshadowed by an unhappy second marriage and alcoholism. — Dennis Drabelle
