“CHANG”

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 76, 21 June 1927, Page 15

“CHANG”

A JUNGLE PICTURE “Chang.” a motion picture revealing the hazardous life of the jungle, has been brought back to New York by Major Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, who spent a year and nine months in the remote mterior of Siam making the production. Cooper and Schoedsack are the two adventurers who four years ago filmed “Grass,” the epic trek of the Persian tribes in their search for pasturage. Heralded by Paramount in such extravagant superlatives as “one of the greatest pictures of all time,” “Chang is utterly different from any photoplay ever mader in that although the ferocious animals of the jungle—tigers, leopards, elephants, great snakes and chattering monkeys, are the principal actors—the picture contains a basic plot, skilfully embroidered with the conventional dramatic forms of sympathy, struggle, menace. traged > , pathos and exceptional comedy, furnished by a white gibbon named Bimbo. The theme of "Chang” is most elemental —the conflict of man against his implacable foe, the jungle and the hostile beasts sheltered by its abundant i foliage. In making "Chang.” Cooper and Schoedsack faced death constantly, not only from the tigers, elephants, leopards and snakes. but from cholera, which took the lives of seven native members of their expedition. Schoedsack himself was stricken with a : severe attack of malaria which delayed ; work on the film. As the protagonists of man in his ; eternal fight to wrest a living from the wild. Cooper and Schoedsack chose a heroic Siamese family, a man ami his i wife and their three children, with | their household pets, and Bimbo, the „ ! white gibbon.