Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927)

By CinemaSerf

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.