Man, the intruder, came into the Jungle... He fought it... He never vanquished it...
Following in the snowshoe tracks of Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack broke into the movie business with two silent ethnographic-style documentaries purporting to be the unvarnished accounts of people battling the forces of nature in inhospitable climes. In the first, 1925's Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life, they followed a tribe of nomads on its annual migration across Iran in search of arable land, but it was the second that foreshadowed their biggest success, 1933's King Kong, since Carl Denham's whole schtick is making wildlife pictures like Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness.
Released in 1927, Chang was filmed in the northern part of what was then called Siam, deep in its dangerous Jungle, which is always capitalized in the intertitles and is as much a character as the tribesmen attempting to eke out a living there -- or at the very least not get eaten by tigers or trampled by elephants. Cooper and Schoedsack's focus is on a farmer named Kru, who has ventured into the Jungle with his wife Chantui, their children, and their livestock (including two goats, a calf, a water buffalo, and some pigs), but is able to return to his home village for help whenever they're threatened by the local animal population. (This is where Chang's story diverges sharply from The Witch.) In addition to the tigers and elephants -- called "Chang" by Kru's people -- said threats include leopards, snakes, and bears, all of which fall prey to the various traps set out by Kru and the other villagers. Suffice it to say, regardless of Chang's place in film history, it's not recommended for animal lovers. Aside from the comic antics of Bimbo the Monkey -- who's given more dialogue than everyone else in the film combined -- much of the rest of the animal action is a little hard to watch today.