398 EURAMERICA The animals themselves are your actors—bad actors most of them, dangerous, and as temperamental as any Hollywood star. They make their own plot and story as they go along, and they are likely to change any scenario you have hoped for, suddenly and without warning. The ‘stage’ these work on is the jungle—this is your setting, and the jungle was not designed by Nature for the making of movies. (Buck & Fraser, 1941: 208) Though he suggests that filming introduces new challenges and opportunities, he still tries to provide the implicit promise of the books, giving the viewer his/her own sense of being in the wild. No longer the solo protagonist in his narrative, Buck finds himself having to act as a mediator between animals and film crew, who can be as frustrating as their subjects: Transport a director and camera crew, accustomed to Hollywood actors . . . into the raw jungle of Malaya, and they are rather lost. They are likely to become impatient when they find that you cannot order jungle animals around as you can movie actors or trained studio animals with keepers in attendance. (Lehrer, 2000: 234) And yet, Buck does his best to arrange situations so that the animals do conform to the demands of the director and crew. Since Buck’s three most famous films are based on his books of the same titles, the films inevitably illustrate scenes previously described and he felt obliged to stage them so that they fulfilled readers’ expectations. However, instead of the complex mix of ethological observations of animals and ethnographical commentary on local communities, the vagaries of human individuals and their relationships in traditional and colonial cultures, and revelations of heartbreaking failures found in the books, the films offer a much more simple melodramatic formula of animal capture, conflict, and death, relieved only by short episodes of comic animal behavior. Many of the ingenious forms of capture Buck demonstrates are revealed to be native techniques, and are actually enacted by his
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