Music To Soothe Savage Beasts

In his seminal book on early cinema's pioneering embrace of the dangers of location filming, "The War, the West, and the Wilderness," Kevin Brownlow declared 1927's "Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness" "the audience picture supreme." Adventure-minded showmen producer-directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, the team that a half-decade later would bring the world the original "King Kong," shot "Chang" entirely on location in Thailand (save for one pickup shot taken in the Central Park Zoo), using native villagers as protagonists and marauding, indigenous animals as antagonists. Though presented as a kind of a nonfiction travelogue adventure drama, "Chang" is nevertheless, in Mr. Brownlow's estimation, "no more a documentary than 'King Kong.'"

Tonight, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Golden Silents series will present "Chang" with live accompaniment by Boston's Alloy Orchestra, last heard in the city backing up Josef von Sternberg's 1927 protean gangster picture "Underworld" during the 2007 New York Film Festival.

A trio comprising percussionists Ken Winokur and Terry Donahue, along with keyboard player Roger Miller, the Alloy Orchestra has led the charge in latter-day re-scorings and live performances of early film soundtracks with a rhythm-driven energy that owes more to the early 1980s Boston punk scene (Mr. Miller, as any post-punk train spotter can tell you, was the guitar player in that city's highly influential rock band Mission of Burma) than to John Williams's Boston Pops.

Mr. Winokur's assessment of tonight's film is not much different from Mr. Brownlow's. "It's a really compelling, really odd kind of quasi-documentary," he said. It's also a film that, unlike previous Alloy score performances such as Fritz Lang's futuristic "Metropolis" (1927) and Dziga Vertov's visual city-poem "The Man With the Movie Camera" (1929), is "untouched by modernity."

Though propelled by exuberant twin percussion, Alloy's performance of "Underworld" this fall (which will have a repeat engagement in the Prospect Park Bandshell this summer) and other recent Alloy scores have inclined Messrs. Winokur and Donahue to include accordion, recorders, and clarinet along with their rhythmic duties. Unlike Lang's over-the-top science-fiction epic, Von Sternberg's film is at heart a love triangle, and demands a musical accompaniment that shares the story's ultimately emotional goals. "There weren't enough films like 'Metropolis' that demanded that two-thirds of the band be drummers," Mr. Winokur said.

The story of a Thai village family relocating into the primeval heart of darkness, "Chang" is a film crying out for jungle drums. Tonight's performance marks something of an instrumental return to form for the Alloy Orchestra. "This score in a way is coming back to our roots," Mr. Winokur said. "Terry and I are playing a huge amount of percussion."

While the drums may take musical center stage, it's the film and its exotic locale that truly call the tune. Mr. Winokur describes the Alloy's compositional onus as "trying to envision what the style of music is that's actually going to make the film and the director's ideas come across most effectively."

In the case of "Chang," that means "not playing rock 'n' roll music in the middle of rural Thailand, or even symphonic music," he said. "This one needed something that made you feel in the setting."

Cooper and Schoedsack's travelogue dramas such as "Chang" and its more sedate 1925 trans-Persian dramatic predecessor, "Grass," were, according to the filmmakers' self-proclaimed ballyhoo mantra, governed by the "three D's: keep it distant, difficult, and dangerous." "Chang" delivered the goods on both sides of the camera.

The shoot, in what was then known as exotic, far-flung Siam, was plagued by ill weather that threatened to halt production, and constant humidity that mildewed film stock before it could even be exposed.

Cooper was wracked with malaria throughout. Even though they were working with actual tigers, leopards, and a herd of elephants, Cooper and Schoedsack insisted on shooting the film without the aid of remotely placed telephoto lenses that might have given cast and crew a head start if something went wrong.

The results make the risks seem well worth it. "The rhythm builds, with sights unfamiliar despite the hundreds of wildlife pictures since, to a climax that belittles such publicity terms as 'stupendous,'" wrote Mr. Brownlow, a rearward-looking critical taste-maker not inclined to hyperbole. "The natural wildlife shots are outrageous," Mr. Winokur said in agreement. "They're just totally amazing."

In a notebook entry detailing the arduous shoot of the film he would declare in 1966 "still the best picture I ever made," Cooper might very well have been setting the stage for tonight's performance.

"Above the sound of the storm," he wrote, "a new noise struck my ear." When the Alloy Orchestra takes the stage at the Walter Reade Theater tonight, a new musical epilogue will be added to one of film history's most bizarre, unique, and marvelous cinematic chapters.

"Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness" will screen tonight at 6:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. at the Walter Reade Theater (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).