Chang

Although crippled by a little too much comic relief from "cute" intertitle cards and an overacting monkey, this is a fascinating look at life in the jungles of Laos in the 1920s. You come away from this film with a respect for the cunning viciousness of wild tigers and leopards. Sure elephants are huge and can destroy a whole village when they stampede but the tigers and leopards seen here are just plain mean. Highly recommended is the audio commentary on the DVD which gives the listener a wealth of background information on the hell of making a film in the 115 degree jungle heat and constant danger of death from disease and animals.

Thanks to those other reviewers for filling in the background to what is now an antique-- but no less fascinating-- oddity. The movie reflects a time period when enterprising (and intrepid) filmmakers like Cooper and Schoedsack were discovering the audience potential for semi-documentaries showing exotic peoples and locales.

Here it's an adventure in northern Siam (Thailand). The rough storyline follows a Laotian family and villagers as they compete against a fierce jungle for livelihood. As expected, scenes are filled with wild beasts and clambering natives. Some scenes are obvious pandering —the gamboling monkey, the cute baby; others are pure spectacle—the rampaging elephant herd, the marauding big cats. Of course, much of the animal spectacle-- though not the killing-- is familiar in our age of 24-hour cable TV. Still, seeing how the natives cope under primitive conditions remains fascinating.

A couple points, I think, are worth noting. Though the exact locale is not pin-pointed on a map, the location appears roughly within what has since become known notoriously as The Golden Triangle (northern convergence of Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam). Whatever its status in 1927, the Triangle has grown into one of the world's biggest sources of heroin-grade opium. I can't help wondering whether the advance of a money economy has since turned villagers like those of the movie into cash-crop farmers.

Also, the movie's theme writes confidently of the jungle's permanent presence. Eighty years later with new waves of extractive technology, and I wonder if that permanence is as assured now as it was then. Looks to me like the rainforests are under industrial siege and may well be losing their presence in the face of human advancement. A rather ironical turn of events.

Neither of these points is meant to detract from the overall excellence of the film. However, I don't think the movie should be viewed as a dead historical document. Instead, it can be used as an informative lens for looking at the age-old struggle between man and nature.

This is a thoroughly amazing and brilliant film, that strangely enough not too many of the newer film-buffs have seen, despite the universal fame of Cooper and Shoedsack due to 1933's legendary "King Kong." Actually, they were almost as famous before that. When "Chang" came out in 1927, pre-King-Kong, post-Flaherty's-Nanook and Cooper and Shoedsack's own earlier "Grass," it became one of the most popular films ever made. The reason is simple: unlike the moderately successful, equally brilliant but more national-geographic-like and meditatively paced "Grass," (plenty of people may have accidentally stumbled upon it and seen it looking for films about Marijuana!) which deals with the emigration of Persian Nomads away from the winter and towards the land that has "Grass," this one is set in the middle of a sweltering, friggin' jungle in Siam (Thailand today), amidst wild animals, and has non-stop danger and adventure from beginning to end, not to mention a hilarious sense of humor.

The Thai woman in the film is actually not the spouse of Kru, the main actor, who was Cooper and Shoedsack's interpreter, but the wife of someone else living there. All these people were acting in the film without ever having seen a movie in their lives, reacting to these incredible events as they happened. Tigers, Leopards, rice farmers in the middle of a jungle running up coconaut trees to escape from them, Monkeys named Bimbo, and of course, Changs (meaning Elephants in the local language of Siam), and the big Chang/Elephant herd stampede, one of the greatest sequences ever filmed by anyone--all this is in Cooper and Shoedsack's film, which they shot all by themselves, with NO CREW, NO LIGHTING EQUIPMENT, and a 70,000 dollar budget which went up only to about 95,000 when the film took a little longer than expected, and they put some money in out of their own pockets which the studio later reimbursed. The new music by Bruce Gaston is absolutely brilliant, using a combination of traditional Thai music and modern sounds but never sounding trite or superficial. So many silent films suffer from bad, endlessly repetitive soundtracks that make you want to tear your hair out, this restored version of "Chang" on Image DVD isn't one of them. Rent it off the Internet or just go ahead and buy it, it's worth every penny, has a good transfer, an informative commentary track, and believe me, it's one of those films that you'll want to watch over and over again.

Kru, wife Chantui and their three children live a fairly subsistence life in this silent film set amongst the wilderness of the Siamese forest. Here they try to peacefully co-exist with nature - providing they keep their livestock in an heavily fortified coral and build their home high up on stilts where coconut milk and freshly milled rice sustains them. A visiting leopard makes short work of his animal's defences though, and he decides that he must ensnare this beast before it eats him out of house and home (and quite possibly family, too). He carries on cultivating his land using a water buffalo whilst their pet - a perfectly wild - monkey makes short work of the larder and Chantui weaves herself a basket. Night-time brings an a operation that might make Noah's ark look straightforward as they get their animals snug, and hopefully safe for the night. Sadly, more bad news awaits them in the morning when they discover that the buffalo went for an early morning stroll and encountered a tiger! What of the leopard, though? Will it take the bait and find self ensnared too? Kru realises he needs help so travels to the local village to get help building more, sometimes quite complex, traps and tracking down the beast of prey. Pits, nets, razor sharp bamboo spikes. Battles lines are drawn as man hunts beast and beast hunts man. There's something authentic about this. Aside from some pretty risky natural world photography, we see that the ingenuity and weaponry of man is usually more than a match for the instinctive power of those wild creatures who are simply no match for ropes and the bullet! Until, that is, an herd of elephants prove that even bullets won't stop everything and the villagers must resort to camouflage and stealth to drive and contain this marauding menace! At times it's quite exciting to watch and it builds well to a dangerous and chaotic if, I felt, entirely unsatisfactory denouement. All sorts of critters feature here and it's worth watching to illustrate just how nature gets on when mankind is part of it's matrix, not all of it. "Brain outweighs brawn". Pity, that, sometimes.

In the 1932 classic "King Kong," the protagonist is a filmmaker who has made a living traveling to remote locations with exotic backgrounds to film wildlife adventures. Hence he journeys to Skull Island where he's heard a gigantic ape is living. The Kong backstory closely resembles the team made up Merian C. Cooper, who produced the original "Kong" 1932 movie, and his cameraman Ernest Schoedsack, when they received funding from Paramount Pictures to film their adventures in northern Thailand. Part-owner Jesse Lasky of Paramount was so impressed by the pair's previous effort where they followed a Persian tribe's migration, 1925's "Grass," he had his studio pay them by sponsoring the trip to this Asian country.

His instincts were spot on since the April 1927 release of "Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness" was received with great acclaim and rousing rounds of applause from packed theater audiences nationwide. The feature film was constructed as a documentary. If the viewer didn't know better, the two Americans capture the reality of a remote tribe living off the land in the jungles of Thailand as true-to-life.

But like most documentaries produced during the time, "Chang," which means 'Elephant" in Thai, was manipulated by the two filmmakers to fit their intended framework drawn up before they even arrived on the scene. The documentary's main character, Kru, was the guide for them and arranged for his family (besides a stand-in for his wife) and his friends to play the parts of members of a society that had long abandoned the practices displayed in the movie. Kru's background included not only being a guide, fisherman, hunter and trapper, but he was a practicing preacher as well as a carpenter.

Nonetheless, it was dangerous work for Cooper and Schoedsack to film the breathtaking wild animal footage. Cooper was at the ready with a gun when needed if the tigers, lions and elephants being photographed up close decided to lunge at the pair. Such a scenario played out on one occasion when a tiger approached uncomfortably too close to them. Another particularly dangerous set-up was when, using director John Ford's technique, Schoedsack dug a hole and positioned his camera to capture the rampaging elephants literally trampling over the planks lined above him. The weight of the heavy animals nearly broke the wood situated precariously just inches from his head.

The 18-month shoot was an ordeal for Cooper, who battled a case of malaria throughout the shoot. The production crew was forced to prepare for daily early morning filming since the animals were mostly active during the coolness of the day. They became lethargic in the afternoon and sought shelter as the Thai heat overtook the jungle. The humidity was so common that it wrecked havoc on the film stock and equipment, which had to be maintained on an hourly basis.

The manipulations of the producers are clearly shown in several sequences. The cross-cutting edits between man-hungry animals who corner the natives up a tree and the medium shots of the natives hanging waiting for relief shows the two scenes were clearly filmed separately. In the climatic sequence where a herd of elephants are stampeding and crushing the village's houses, the producers built miniature flimsy buildings and rounded a bunch of baby and juvenile elephants to make the model huts appear bigger than they really were. In another sequence, the crew tied up a baby elephant underneath a rickety tall hut and waited for the mother to come storming onto the scene. Sure enough, the irate adult elephant in a rage destroyed the building like it was balsa wood to free her baby.

"Chang" is still as thrilling of a movie to see today as it had been when it first premiered. Once the documentary was ready for release, Paramount wanted to use the reactions of animals caged in zoos looking at the projected film for publicity purposes. But studio executives were disappointed that so few zoos took up the offer. The recently established Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, holding its first Academy Awards in 1929, nominated "Chang" as one of three pictures for 'Unique and Artistic Productions.' The category was the only time the Academy listed it. But at the time it was considered as prestigious as its other category, 'Outstanding Picture.' In retrospect, "Chang" is the only documentary to ever have been nominated as a Best Picture.