Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925)

Directors: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack
Writers: Terry Ramsaye and Richard P. Carver
Stars: Haidar Khan and Lufta

Index: That's a Wrap!

Here’s something a little different: a feature film whose première was at the annual dinner of the Explorers Club in New York. Then again, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, a duo best known today for directing King Kong, could be fairly described in 1925 as explorers.

Initially a journalist, Cooper became a pilot, serving in multiple wars. He was shot down in action in the First World War and the Polish-Soviet War, resulting in time spent in German and Soviet POW camps. Marguerite Harrison, an American spy, who he had met in Warsaw, helped him out in the latter.

Back home, he returned to journalism and a job writing articles for Asia magazine, seeking the Missing Link in the Malay archipelago and visiting Ras Tafari in Abyssinia, where footage was shot by Schoedsack. They were grounded by pirates in the Red Sea but escaped, only for the ship to burn in Suez.

And then they set off for Persia to shoot this documentary about what his researches at the American Geographical Society had identified as the most formidable migration in the world. Cooper’s family lent him $5,000 to finance the effort and Schoedsack brought a light camera, a hand-cranked Debrie, with twenty thousand feet of 35mm film. When Harrison put up the other $5,000 needed, she included a condition, that she join them on the expedition.

We see all three on screen, but only briefly as an introduction. Cooper and Schoedsack did their work behind the camera while Harrison gradually vanishes by the halfway mark.

Early on, we see her around campfires or on wagons, as these explorers follow the caravan route out of Angora in Turkey. It’s a thirty day slog that takes them across windswept desert from village to village with regular travellers.

It’s almost a perky film at this point, partly because of the community feel in play at the caravanserai and partly because of the quirky shots that Schoedsack manages to get.

The former is the desert traveller’s refuge, a truck stop in modern parlance, and everything is communal. People talk together round a fire at night, bed down together in a courtyard, eat together in the morning and leave together in after sunup. Our explorers are welcomed into this community, even as unusual as they are.

Some of the latter are clearly staged in the manner of the time, the documentary film not having a firm rulebook yet, but they’re no less effective for that. As their horsedrawn wagon rides under a bridge, local children rush onto it to look down at the camera. Of course it was carefully set up in advance. I’d expect the long shot one tribesman manages to get mountain goat for dinner was staged too.

Other shots, however, are more likely due to luck and often involve camels. One snarls at Marguerite while another nuzzles a puppy. We feel the desert sandstorm too, especially with no goggles available. Still more may just come down to enthusiasm from the locals, like when they hang out with desert policemen at their headquarters. They patrol to protect the tribes from Bedouin marauders but there are only a hundred men for an area larger than Arizona.

Ultimately, none of this is the film’s point, a selection of travelogue scenes captured on the way to their real destination in western Persia, the Baba Ahamadi tribe of nomadic Bakhtyari, described here as the Forgotten People, which is a little overdone. There are fifty thousand of them, for a start, and it doesn’t take a heck of a lot of research to see how the Bakhtiari, to use the current spelling, have had a big impact on Iranian politics over centuries.

During this film, their leader is Haidar Khan, who’s as close to a star as this film gets, along with his nine year old son, Lufta. Probably the biggest problem the film has is that it doesn’t follow them more. While the sheer magnitude of the migration to come cannot be denied, it’s fair to say that it starts to get repetitive during the late stages. Keeping a focus on individuals like these would have tempered that.

Instead, we see the grandeur of the task and marvel at the tenacity of this tribe to achieve it. We see it once, as they migrate from winter lands, where the grass is withered and almost gone, to spring lands, where it’s plentiful once more. What we don’t see is the return journey, because they do this twice a year, once in each direction, uprooting their entire civilisation.

Cooper apparently planned to return to the Bahktiari in 1947 and effectively remake Grass, but Schoedsack pointed out that a railway had been built through these lands, so the perilous journey that they captured in 1924 was far less perilous, aided by cars, trucks and trains.

Fortunately, of course, they captured it back in 1924, because their migration in its old form is so extreme that it almost beggars belief. It’s hardly a trivial feat to move an entire tribe of fifty thousand people, realising that it must be everyone, from the young and helpless to the old and infirm. Of course, it must include their herds too, both driven and carried, and every possession they have. That’s a lot of work with no modern technology.

Now, factor in the Persian landscape. I don’t mean the windswept desert of Angora. This is further east and it’s far more extreme, almost like it was designed to be impossible.

There’s the river Karun, which they cross by swimming across or inflating pigskins to float rafts, hoping either way to survive the rapids. The crossing takes six days and nights, but the other side is a two thousand foot sheer cliff. A lot of the goats can climb that but the people have to carry any animals that can’t.

And so they go, conquering each obstacle as best they can until they reach Zardeh Kuh, the boss battle in this film, a twelve thousand foot mountain, coated in thick snow. The men have to go in barefoot to carve a trail that everyone else can follow. Eventually, of course, the tribe conquers that too and the land of grass awaits, where they can put up their tents and enjoy the next six months before the return trip.

It’s easy to see how Cooper and Schoedsack ended up making King Kong, not just through a spirit of adventure but through facing odds of unbelievable magnitude and winning.

There’s also a sense of scale here even at the caravanserai, which grows when we reach the Karun and Zardeh Kuh. Everything here is big except for us and that goes for the film as well, especially considering when it was shot. It’s a towering achievement of a film, beaten to the public by Nanook of the North but unfolding on a completely different scale.