Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness

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.

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.

Previously Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack made Grass, a very great silent documentary inspired by the success of Nanook of the North (which they hadn't even seen when they were flying off to the Middle East to film the long migration of a group of nomads). Grass was a real documentary, with little staging. Nanook, however, had a lot of staging, and has suffered a ton of criticism since its first release because of it. No matter how clearly Nanook is staged, Cooper's and Schoedsack's Chang is a hundred times more staged.

I don't care. It's an amazing film. Call it a fictionalized documentary, or a fudged one. Whatever. Chang is an awesome movie. The story is gripping, the cinematography is great, and the filmmaking in general is wonderful. I'm sitting there wondering how the hell they got these shots of tigers and elephants and stuff. I'm thinking Carl Denham, the risk-taking filmmaker from their own later King Kong. This whole movie seems like a preparation for King Kong. A couple of the scenes are repeated there. This may be preparation, but it is as amazing in its own way. 10/10.