Chang A Drama of the Wilderness

Cooper liked to call himself an explorer; Schoedsack was a newsreel cameraman. They shared a taste for exotic adventure that proved popular with audiences back home in America. Grass was their first success, an account of the annual 40-day migration of 50,000 Bakhtiari tribesmen - and their half million livestock - into northern Iran. Schoedsack's camerawork is the most impressive feature in the team's follow-up, Chang. While focusing on Kru, a Lao farmer in northern Thailand, and his family, and interspersing the dramatic material with domestic scenes, it feels staged and self-conscious; the film-makers are clearly more interested in bagging leopards, tigers and elephants. Oh, and in an anthropomorphised family pet called 'Bimbo', perhaps a distant relative to Schoedsack and Cooper's most famous creation, King Kong.