Five years before King Kong mounted the Empire State clutching ‘golden woman’ Fay Wray in his car-sized mitt, director Merian C. Cooper rehearsed his abiding theme of savagery versus civilisation in a half-forgotten master­piece of silent cinema. The 1927 film, co-directed with cameraman Ernest B. Schoedsack, is titled Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness. Every bit as edgy as King Kong, with considerably more charm, it’s a documentary-style fable about things that go wrong when we invade the wild. The beast at the heart of the tale—more menace than monster—is an elephant, for which the Thai name is chang.

Chang was nominated at the first Academy Awards in 1929 for a category, Best Unique and Artistic Picture, well worth reviving. The film would have been really something in its day, with an original score and an elephant stampede shot in an early form of widescreen. But as the pace of cinematic invention quickened—sound and colour were introduced in the 1930s—Chang was soon overtaken. And then pfft! Gone. The film went missing, largely unlamented—though not by its creators Cooper and Schoedsack—for the next six decades.