Touches You

Purely Joyful Movie!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

When one compares this film with the same directors' earlier Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925, one sees how clearly it is a step in the wrong direction for documentary albeit a step in the right direction for the team that would make King Kong. According to another reviewer, Schoedsack and Cooper had not seen Nanook of the North (1922) when they made their film Grass and, if true, that fact explains a great deal. In Grass, they made a film that had the real smell of reality about it, a reality that they seem genuinely have encountered more or less by accident and it is a passionate story, quite the best travel film of the silent era and one of the best, in my view, of all time.This second venture, on the other hand, has "F for fake" (one might equally say "F for Flaherty") written all over it and is a good measure of the deplorable influence that Flaherty, for all his undoubted ability, would have on US documentary-making. The fact that the film was amongst the first Oscar winners is equally symptomatic. When there was a choice between sensationalised drama and truth, the US film industry has never doubted for a moment which it preferred. Plus ça change....I am happy with Grass and I am happy, for that matter, with King Kong but Kingkongery masquerading as documentary is not my cup of tea.

A combination of a nature documentary and a staged drama about life in the jungles of Southeast Asia in the 1920s. Multiple and brutal dangers present challenges to a little family living apart from their village...life goes on despite hardship. How did they get some of the shots? The film will make you wonder about how life used to be before there were today's modern conveniences...it is very much kill or be killed. There is some comic relief...Bimbo steals the show. Easy to see the embryonic shots that evolve into King Kong a few years later. Worthy of the nomination received for best film of its class that year. Highly recommended.

This documentary was nominated for Artistic Quality of Production for the very first Academy Awards. The category appeared only once, apparently to give recognition to works with more critical than commercial success. Chang holds up very well and despite at times being too ridiculous for words is well worth viewing for the shots of animals in the wild and an enchanting musical score added in re-release. Brought to you by the same production team that did the original King Kong.

There is more than a little irony in seeing a film that is so much like an anthropological field work, but with a superimposed plot structure and characterization that we now find unacceptably corny. The music is marvelous, by the famed Thai group Fong Naam, and the ethnographic details are rich.