Bring ’em Back Alive 399 Malay assistants rather than himself, such as catching a bird of paradise with a noose of twine in a tree, or enticing dusky leaf monkeys with coconut husks filled with rice so that the monkeys’ hands get stuck when they grab it, making them easy to catch. Every shot introduces a new menace or desired animal object on which to exercise a unique type of capture technique; Buck is seen directing the action but rarely physically participating. In Jungle Animals published after the three films, Buck and Fraser (1945: 41) relate that when releasing a mousedeer from a native trap, a python bit his arm and he had to shoot it to free himself. The filmed version of the scene, however, is obviously set up because the python is shown lurking in the bushes before attacking. Buck also left himself open to charges of fakery when discovered to have created some scenes in manmade enclosures near Singapore, not in the deep jungle, as his first director Clyde Elliott (as cited in Toh, 2012) revealed in his memoirs. His second director, Armand Denis (1963: 56-57), went further in accusing Buck of faking his jungle exploits, especially the capture of a man-killing tiger. In the book Bring ’em Back Alive, Buck points out that only old or debilitated tigers are likely to kill humans, but when a rubber tapper is mauled to death, he sets about trapping the killer. He describes the whole process with personal and cultural contexts which are absent in the filmed version that shows only the making and concealing of the pit, and the tiger falling into it. After his assistants tether the tiger, Buck descends into the pit to force the animal into a lowered cage. The book describes the immense difficulty because the men holding ropes slip and fall on the muddy ground, and the nails that Buck needs to fasten the cage door cannot be found. The film shows none of this heightened tension nor Buck’s panicked screams. When the cage is raised, the tiger can no longer be clearly seen inside. Denis reveals that because a storm had flooded the pit and drowned the “large placid old tiger specially hired from a local animal dealer” that Buck is actually shown wrestling a dead animal. Denis admitted, however, that the final scene looked very
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