Seigneurs de la jungle

You will never find a better time capsule of 1933 than Bring 'Em Back Alive. This spectacular and horrifying documentary gets you inside the world and mind of one of the most celebrated hunters (and anthropologists!) of all time. This should be seen as one of the few surviving cinematic treatises on the state of wildlife in 1933 and also as a very telling piece of history.

I was expecting more of an Indiana Jones/Alan Quartermain type of adventure, but this great white hunter jungle story is actually a nature documentary following Frank Buck capturing a baby elephant other various African wildlife. I was probably thinking of the 1980s Bruce Boxleitner TV series (very loosely based upon Buck), which was more "Raiders of the Lost Ark" than "Wild Kingdom." This documentary is interesting as a time capsule, even if most of the film is clearly staged.

This purports to be the visual diary of one of Buck's expeditions to the Malay jungle to collect wild animals for zoos and circuses. Shot wild (without sound) and then narrated by Buck in a studio and with a score added by Frank Rodemich, it will strike the modern viewer as a black-and-white precursor of a Disney Tru-Life-Adventure movie, with enough random fights between top predators to keep people who like that happy. Add in enough eighty-year-old assumptions in the narration to annoy the modern viewer ("His skin was black, but he was white inside"), and you wind up with something of interest mostly for people with an antiquarian taste in movies. In 1932, it was an exciting documentary and there were several sequels.

A lot of the shots are faked; the ones in which Buck's "boys" are carrying a black leopard in a wooden cage seem to lack the leopard. However, I understand that Disney's cameramen staged a lot of their animal antics.

As one might expect, this is a series of Ramar-walking-around-the-bushes shots of Buck, intercut with Malayan jungle photography and staged animal fights, plus some sequences of catching animals in old-fashioned drop-door cages and camouflaged-pit traps. The brevity (65 minutes), the music, and Buck's amateur, clipped, breathless narration ("All at once! A new menace! Appeared on the scene!") make the film watchable. Buck is usually seen with faithful best boy Ali: "His body was brown! But he was all white inside!" The staged fights, in which both contestants generally walk (or slither) away unhurt, include: black leopard vs. python, black leopard vs. tiger, python vs. crocodile, tiger vs. water buffalo, and python vs. tiger. The last is the finale, and it's fascinating to see how the python, its head being held by the tiger, swings the lower part of its body completely around and envelops the tiger. In this pre-Code film, are there shots of beautiful young bare-breasted native girls? What do YOU think?

Over 80 years after its first release Frank Buck's Bring 'Em Back Alive still is quite a work of film making. Even though the animals confrontations are clearly being staged the fact that the film was done at all is a source of some wonder. A couple of years before MGM had so many problems shooting Trader Horn on location not the least of which was tropical disease that no companies went on jungle location from America until The African Queen and King Solomon's Mines were done. I think we can assume that Mr. Buck in his work had become acclimatized years earlier.

Safaris were nothing new. The most famous one was that of former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 after he left office. Hunters were nothing new either. But trapping animals including some really dangerous species was a new idea back in the day and while Frank Buck wasn't the first he certainly popularized the notion. Bring them back for study and exhibit.

Time has overtaken Frank Buck. These same animals he trapped and others hunted are now in danger of extinction. The Good Book says God made man to rule over the rest of the species, but nowhere does it say exterminate them. We are their stewards, their caretakers and that is the idea that predominates now.

Still Buck and his exploits made him a popular hero. Buck was also his best publicist as this film shows.

It also shows some of his racial attitudes no doubt acquired in his childhood in Gainesville, Texas. I got a bit of a jolt when during his narration he meets up with some of the Malay natives who had worked on his safaris before. They were old and valued friends and he gave them what in his 1932 Texas mindset the highest possible compliment that they may be brown skinned, but they're all white on the inside.

You can interpret that in a lot of ways. For myself I believe it was the attitude of a man brought up a certain way, but having to work with and depend on people of a different race his attitudes were adjusting. In his mind he thought of it as praise. I guess we can leave it at that.

Racial attitudes notwithstanding Frank Buck was a man who was an adventurer who was in a dangerous business, bring 'em back alive.