Grass; A Nation's Battle for Life
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Merian Cooper
Merian Cooper
Ernest B. Schoedsack
Marguerite Harrison
Haidar Khan
Lufta
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
Marguerite Harrison, Merian Cooper, and Ernest B. Schoedsack travel through Asia Minor to reach a tribe of nomads in Iran known as the Bakhtiari. They follow the tribesmen on their 48-day trek across deserts, rivers, and mountains to reach summer pasture for their flocks. The hardships and conquests of the 50,000 tribesmen are shown: fording the treacherous waters of the Karun River by floating on rafts buoyed by inflated goatskins; ascending an almost perpendicular mountain only to be confronted by yet another, pathless and covered with deep snow; and finally descending to their goal--a fertile and grassy valley.
Film Details
Technical Specs
Articles
The Sea of Grass
The movie's plot is best described as a western-set soap opera with Katharine Hepburn as a St. Louis lady who marries New Mexico cattle baron Spencer Tracy, only to find out that he is tyrannically battling the homesteaders who have been settling on his land (which is known as "the sea of grass"). Turned off by her husband's methods, Hepburn has an affair with his enemy, Melvyn Douglas, which produces a son. She and Tracy get back together, and the illegitimate son eventually grows up as a ne'er-do-well (Robert Walker), leading to more tragedy and melodramatic conflicts.
Kazan was so attracted to this story that he specifically asked MGM to let him direct it. He was under contract to Fox at the time, where he had directed his 1945 debut A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but it was not an exclusive contract and he was free to work for other studios if he wanted. What drew him to The Sea of Grass, he told interviewer Michel Ciment, "was the size of the classic American story" and "a feeling...that when history changes, something wonderful is lost." Kazan envisioned spending months on location a la Robert Flaherty, and making an almost anthropological film using unknown actors whose "faces are like leather." What he got instead was a typical studio movie with huge stars on a soundstage.
Meeting with MGM producer Pandro S. Berman, Kazan discovered that the studio planned to shoot the film almost entirely on the lot with rear-projection images of rolling grass and hills. "It became apparent," Kazan told Ciment, "that none of the picture was going to be shot on location - and it was a picture about grass, country and sky! Now, if I had been knowledgeable, strong, confident, if I had protected my own dignity, I would have quit. But somehow I was trained not to stop, to find the best solution possible." When the final script came in, it too was not quite to the director's liking, but there was little Kazan could do. He had yet to make a serious name for himself in Hollywood, and his clout was limited.
All accounts of The Sea of Grass stress the disharmony on set between Kazan and his two stars. Tracy was suffering from drinking problems and under-acted. Hepburn was primarily interested in controlling Tracy's drinking and overacted. Kazan's Method approach did not work well with Tracy's more instinctive style, and they clashed, with Hepburn arbitrating the confrontations. In her biography Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Leaming wrote, "Kate insulated Spencer from pressure that might drive him to drink. Concerned solely with keeping him sober, she encouraged him basically to walk through the film. Shrewdly, she made it impossible for Kazan to say a word about Tracy's listless performance. Hardly would he finish a take when Kate's voice resounded through the set: 'Wasn't that wonderful? How does he do it? He's so true! He can't do anything false!' Kazan was defeated."
Co-star Melvyn Douglas echoed these observations in his autobiography. Kazan, he recounted, was intimidated by his two stars. He would "work into the night preparing for the next day's work, soaking himself in the script, only to be confronted in the morning by genial Spencer Tracy, who would arrive, throw himself into a chair and casually memorize his lines. Kazan seemed to want bursts of energy and an undertone of malevolence out of the actor; Spence projected a heavy, relaxed authority. He was wonderfully skillful but, finally, did not do what the director requested."
For his part, Kazan found Tracy a far cry from the unknown, leathery face he had desired: "I found that he did not like horses and horses did not like him. He is supposed to play a man who spends most of his time on a horse. He was rather plump, not a western type... not at all, in any way, like the type he was being asked to portray."
As for Hepburn, Douglas wrote that "though playing a lady from St. Louis who was virtually being ground into the plains, she seemed reluctant to put aside her star's glamour. Each time she emerged from the dressing room, she had on a fresh new frock, a costuming scheme to which she steadfastly clung in spite of several confrontations with her director." Kazan told Ciment of this: "All the dresses were very nice, but not at all lived in... The effect of the picture was a lot of pretty illustrations."
Douglas poked some fun at himself, too, recalling that after three years away from movie cameras, he was nervous and "could barely ride a horse." When the movie came out, he received a fan letter that requested he "leave the heavy emoting to Laughton" and return to being "gay, debonair Melvyn."
Early in production Kazan got an amusing lesson in the MGM studio philosophy. He had just shot a scene between Hepburn and Douglas in which Hepburn cries. Kazan was proud of the way it turned out; Louis B. Mayer, however, was not. Kazan went to see the studio chief. "She cries too much," Mayer said. "But that is the scene, Mr. Mayer." "The channel of her tears is wrong." "What do you mean?" pressed Kazan. "The channel of her tears goes too close to the nostril, it looks like it is coming out of her nose like snot." "Jesus, I can't do anything with the channel of her tears!" Kazan exclaimed. "Young man," replied Mayer, "you have one thing to learn. We are in the business of making beautiful pictures of beautiful people and anybody who does not acknowledge that should not be in the business."
Producer: Pandro S. Berman
Director: Elia Kazan
Screenplay: Vincent Lawrence, Marguerite Roberts, Conrad Richter (novel)
Cinematography: Harry Stradling, Sr.
Film Editing: Robert Kern
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, Paul Groesse
Music: Herbert Stothart
Cast: Spencer Tracy (Col. James Brewton), Katharine Hepburn (Lutie Cameron Brewton), Robert Walker (Brock Brewton), Melvyn Douglas (Brice Chamberlain), Phyllis Thaxter (Sara Beth Brewton), Edgar Buchanan (Jeff).
BW-123m. Closed captioning.
by Jeremy Arnold
The Sea of Grass
Grass & Chang on DVD - Grass & Chang - Two landmark films by Merian C. Cooper
A decade before King Kong, Merian C. Cooper, an adventurer and aviator, teamed with combat photographer Ernest B. Schoedsack. The two men, both Americans, met in Europe after World War I. They found they had similar dreams and complementary skills, and it wasn't long before they resolved to work together on an adventure film about human migration.
The result of their first collaboration is Grass, a true marvel of filmmaking. Cooper & Schoedsack followed the Baktyari tribe in what is now modern Iran and Turkey. The tribe subsists on their herd animals, which in turn live on the grass. But grass is not available in the same place year-round, so the tribe migrates hundreds of miles, across treacherous rivers and snowy mountains, twice a year, just to survive.
Grass is a truly great documentary -- not just "for a silent film" or "for an 80-year-old film," but on its own merits. The story is timeless, the drama is gripping, the photography is striking, and the settings are exotic. With the modern, flavorful, yet unobtrusive music track (recorded in 1991), it's easy to become engrossed and forget that Grass is a silent, black-and-white film. There is nothing quaint or antiquated about it.
It's also a more objective and honest documentary than, say, Nanook of the North, which uses a lot of staged events, including one notoriously hokey special effect, to tell its story.
Ironically, Cooper had hoped to make Grass more like Nanook. (Not literally. At this time, neither Cooper nor Schoedsack had even heard of Flaherty's movie.) They ran out of money after filming the great migration once. They had hoped to stick with the tribe long enough to film an individual family, whose story they would then intercut with the larger drama. But it wasn't to be, much to the eventual benefit of this film.
But perhaps it was Cooper's frustration at not getting the personal story that drove him to work on Chang, which was released two years later.
Like Grass, Chang is a travel film and an anthropology movie. But Chang allowed Cooper and Schoedsack to finally tell the personal story of a family. This time, they follow Kru, a Lao tribesman living in Siam (modern Thailand/Laos) in his fight for survival against the wild animals of the jungle.
Several factors pushed Cooper and Schoedsack to their new subject. First, says Cooper (joking?), they went from too little vegetation in Grass, to too much vegetation in Chang. But they were also looking for somewhere very remote, a place nearly untouched by civilization. It was a search that led both men out across the jungles of Asia. Ultimately, they chose to shoot Chang in a place that was 6 days by horse away from the nearest whites, Danish teak foresters, and 7 days away from the nearest telegraph and train station.
At first glance, Chang hasn't aged nearly as well as Grass. It's more obviously staged, and the constant presence of a comic-relief monkey smells of "selling" rather than "documenting." The on-screen killing of tigers and leopards is also troubling, particularly in this modern age of conservation and endangered species. (These same traits probably contributed to Chang's bigger box office.)
But the audio commentary by film historian and writer Rudy Behlmer puts the story in its proper historical and anthropological context. Cooper and Schoedsack lived with Kru's people for three months before rolling film. Once they knew what life was like, they were better able to document the drama of daily life. The tigers, leopards, and elephants really did pose a threat to the lives of these Lao people. As for the monkey sidekick, he really was Kru's pet.
Behlmer gives over part of his audio commentary to Merian C. Cooper himself, via an audiotaped interview from 1965. An extended version of the interview is available on the Grass DVD; it covers Cooper's story from World War I all the way through King Kong and beyond.
If you watch Chang closely, you can see harbingers of King Kong. A dangerous jungle plays home to mysterious, dangerous, and gigantic animals. There is a sense of exploration, discovery, and awe of the natural world. The climax of Chang involves a stampede of 400 elephants, and puny men trying to cage them with tools and brainpower. Even the popular appeal ("selling" rather than "documenting") of Chang, resonates in the scenes of Kong being brought to the Great White Way.
But while King Kong leaves itself open to remakes, Chang and Grass are unique, genuine documents of now-disappeared civilizations. Even in 1954, when Cooper considered remaking Chang, he found that civilization had encroached too far, and that cars and rifles had tipped the balance of the jungle hopelessly in man's favor.
As important as King Kong is to the history of film, Grass and Chang, which are documents as well as entertainments, will probably prove to be even greater contributions to the human endeavor.
For more information about Grass and Chang, visit Milestone Films.
by Marty Mapes
Grass & Chang on DVD - Grass & Chang - Two landmark films by Merian C. Cooper
Grass
Grass's directors, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, and their patron, Marguerite Harrison, set out to make a film about a nomadic Asian tribe. The only problem was that they knew little about nomadic Asian tribes and even less about where to find one. After a false start and a lengthy journey, they eventually came into contact with the Bakhtiari in what is now known as western Iran. The Bakhtiari proved to be extraordinarily courageous, fascinating people, and the fledgling directors ended up with some of the more remarkable footage in motion picture history.
Each summer, the Bakhtiari would journey, with their livestock in tow, to pasture grounds in the highlands. What this meant was that 50,000 people and 500,000 animals (that's not a misprint) would trudge across a 12,000-foot mountain range in the snow, ford a river, and climb a sheer mountain face! Their journey was literally a matter of life or death, and it's all caught on film. Stunning moments abound, but you won't soon forget thousands of people swimming across a raging river on inflated goat skins, with their livestock tied up and sprawled across makeshift rafts! Grass may be slightly rickety in its construction, and some of the subtitles verge on the inane, but much of what you'll see is truly beyond belief.
As Richard Griffith noted in a 1925 Museum of Modern Art bulletin on Grass, Cooper and Schoedsack, formed a partnership based on ³a mutual interest in the strange, the dangerous, and the unknown.² Schoedsack, who started out as a camera operator for Mack Sennett, made his name by shooting amazing World War I battle footage, during which he put himself very much in the line of fire. In 1919, still looking to fight, he journeyed to Poland where he met up with Cooper, a kindred spirit who was formerly a pilot in the French military, but by then was a lieutenant-colonel in the Russo-Polish War. After the war, Cooper convinced Schoedsack to join him in making Grass.
Harrison, an ex-journalist and spy (!) who had reportedly saved Cooper's life during the Russian Revolution agreed to help finance Grass, but only if she could participate in its production. So, after writing a check for $5,000, she took the trip of a lifetime. Harrison serves as a sort of stand-in for the audience, appearing in many shots along with the nomads. To call Harrison, Cooper, and Schoedsack gutsy would be a vast understatement. These filmmakers could have been killed while trying to secure their footage, and many of the people they were photographing actually did lose their lives.
Somewhat surprisingly, given their intense personalities, Cooper and Schoedsack had a sense of humor about their exploits. The first fictional film that they made together was a little picture called King Kong (1933), which, of course, is about a gang of camera-toting adventurers who get more than they bargained for in an exotic location. That's right- King Kong is semi-autobiographical! After the traumas they shared with the Bakhtiari while making Grass, Kong would have been a cakewalk even if the gorilla were real.
Producer: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Directors: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Screenplay: Richard Carver, Terry Ramsaye
Cinematography: Merian C. Cooper, Marguerite Harrison, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Film Editing: Richard Carver, Terry Ramsaye
Cast: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, Marguerite Harrison, Haidar Khan, Lufta.
BW-71m.
by Paul Tatara
Grass
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
Also known as Grass; The Epic of a Lost Tribe.
Miscellaneous Notes
Released in United States 1925
Selected in 1997 for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.
reels 7
Released in United States 1925