Bring ’em Back Alive 397 hunting and killing, Buck’s films were the first to feature live capture. However, they still featured predator-on-predator combat to testify to natural savagery, such as prolonged fights—some to the death—between black leopards, tigers, crocodiles, and pythons. The second film Wild Cargo (1934) stars many of the same animal characters but with different “actors” in the roles for rematches. Fang and Claw (1936) features more captures than fights as censors were beginning to reject scenes of gratuitous animal violence.12 Buck’s claim of authenticity, however, created problems not only for himself, but for later wildlife films that were assumed by the public to be documentaries rather than artful fabrications. In reviews of the first film, critics already began expressing suspicion that certain scenes looked staged, not that the film was tampered with, but that the animals were, especially those with predators engaged in mortal combat. In natural circumstances, tigers, leopards, cobras and alligators would avoid rather than attack each other. Buck’s highlighting their violent encounters for the thrill factor alone suggested that the animals had been coerced. There were already precedents of blurring the lines between truth and fiction regarding how film represented wildlife and how that representation was achieved. Buck’s films pushed the limit between accepted staging and baiting practices used by many filmmakers to reduce the time and expense of filming, and outright fraud—actually contriving conflicts that would not happen in the wild. His cinematic versions were two steps removed from fact—first from the original capture, and then from his description of the capture in his books. He felt compelled to make his films conform to the “script” already established by those previously recorded encounters. As a filmmaker, Buck notes that it was not easy: 12 Britain passed the Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act in 1937 banning intentional cruelty to animals in film; a similar ban went into effect in the United States in 1939.
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