Years before they co-directed the original King Kong, filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack teamed for these two pseudo-documentary adventures in exotic faraway lands. While Grass appears to be mostly true to life as it happened, Chang is a heavily staged affair that seems closer to Cooper’s stated intention to dramatize exploration, an approach later honed to fictional perfection in King Kong.
Buy Grass and Chang Blu-rayGrass (1925) tracks the perilous migration of a massive Bakhtiari tribe across remote Iraq, challenging a mighty river and snowy Persian peaks in search of grasslands for their starving herds. The directors and a fellow female adventurer were embedded with the tribe for the duration of the dangerous trek, giving viewers a sense of heightened stakes. However, before they joined the tribe, they did some exploring on their own through Turkey, meeting far-flung tribes and providing ethnologist catnip with their filmed documentation of long-gone fashion and customs. The further they travel from Turkey to Iran, the further back in time they seem to go, encountering remote nomads clinging to centuries-old customs. This early third of the film is confusing since there’s no stated intention of the goal, just random scenes captured along the way.
Once the filmmakers meet up with the tribal chief and the migration gets under way, we’re locked in on a thrilling quest to move 50,000 people and 500,000 animals before they starve or succumb to the elements. We witness the tribe use inflated goat skins lashed to thin layers of sticks to cross a massive, raging river, with many unfortunate animal swimmers lost along the way. That’s just a warm-up for an insane barefoot trek up 12,000-foot-high snow-buried mountains, all with no food or shelter in sight. You’ll likely never be more thankful for modern creature comforts as you relax on the couch in your climate-controlled home.
Although the film has received a 4K restoration, the results are fairly scratchy with more apparent opportunity for digital improvement. Still, considering the century-old source material filmed in inclement conditions, it’s a startlingly accomplished and revealing record of the tribal migration. The black and white film was tinted and toned in alternating single hues for a bit of visual variety, but the lone surviving 35mm print was incomplete. The restoration sources missing material from Cooper’s black and white internegative, so many scenes are not tinted.
Two different scores are included, with the default score by Patrick Holcomb providing a rousing, classically Western orchestral accompaniment. The alternate score is more representative of traditional Persian music, but while it’s likely more appropriate for the film, it’s simply not as engaging as Holcomb’s superb work.
Chang (1927) exposes the hardscrabble lives of a small family attempting to maintain a farm in the middle of the jungles of northern Thailand. Their rickety, hand-crafted house is perched on stilts, not for flooding but to protect them from tigers and leopards. The parents have two small children, but the farm is also populated by a water buffalo, goats, pigs, cats, dogs, and even a pet monkey.
Cooper and Schoedsack soon tire of just presenting the family’s daily grind and insert some staged jungle cat hunting nonsense for dramatic effect, showing the family rigging various traps and then engaging neighbors to canvas the area to flush out the cats into the waiting traps. Unlike modern films, animals were definitely harmed, so your response to this film is likely to be linked to your tolerance for filmed shootings of multiple leopards. The directors cobble together a silly storyline to explain the action, but it’s abundantly clear from the shot framing that they planned everything in advance.
The staged animal invasion continues with the title beast, the Thai term for elephant, with the mighty titans seemingly stampeding through the jungle in a murderous rampage intent on wiping out the humans. It’s all a bunch of hokum by the huckster directors, certainly thrilling for the sheltered domestic viewers of the 1920s and a big step in Kong’s direction, but now most interesting for the early, more realistic reels documenting the family’s farming efforts.
Chang only has one score option, and it’s a doozy: an ill-advised attempt to fuse cultural instruments with weird, discordant synths to middling, repetitive results. The film is also tinted, but not nearly as scratchy as Grass, providing a surprisingly polished end result of the 2K restoration efforts.
Bonus features include color test footage of Chang from an aborted attempt to re-release the film decades later in the Technicolor age. The hand-colored footage is an impressive achievement, especially for its time. Chang also has an audio commentary track. The best bonus feature is a far-ranging archival 90-minute audio interview with Cooper where he discusses his film career in depth, although his mic isn’t the best so he’s a bit hard to understand.
The new Blu-ray collection fleshes out the back story of King Kong’s directors, providing a tangible road map of how they moved from documentary filmmakers to something akin to the sideshow salesmen trumpeting the mythic New York stage arrival of Kong. With the new restorations, the films are well preserved for future generations and intriguing time capsules of long-gone eras.
