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Candidates for the National Film Registry: Fang and Claw & Tiger Fangs

Introduction by Brian Taves

Seventy years ago, big-game hunting was still considered a heroic and thoroughly admirable endeavor. However, the notion of instead studying wild animals, with the possibility of conservation and endangered species, began to penetrate public consciousness.

The slogan "bring 'em back alive," adopted by Frank Buck, was an important turning point in this period, popularizing ideas which are far closer to today's notions of environmental protection. Buck was a businessman, who by the 1920s developed a thriving trade bringing animals back from Asia and selling them to the zoos of the United States and Europe. With the onset of the Great Depression, Buck, like many others, went bankrupt, but this opened up a new and far more important part of his career.

At the time, accounts of white explorers and adventurers in the far reaches of colonized lands were a staple of popular culture. Buck turned his real experience of capturing wild animals into a series of articles for magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. This led to a contract for a book with Simon and Schuster, entitled Bring 'em Back Alive, that became a runaway best seller. Bring 'em Back Alive remained steadily in print for more than two decades, and the phrase that would always henceforth be associated with Buck's name.

With the success of the book, Buck moved on to his long-standing dream of making jungle pictures, inspired by a desire to improve on the films of Ernest Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper. However, Buck had difficulty interesting a major studio in a movie version of Bring 'em Back Alive; he found it far easier, he recalled, to get an audience with the ruling maharajahs of India than the movie moguls, who saw no possibilities in animal films. Finally Van Beuren Pictures, a producer of shorts releasing through the new Hollywood studio, RKO, agreed to back Buck for an expedition to the Malayan jungles to produce thirteen short films. Shooting in Malaya, Sumatra, India and Ceylon, for nine months, Buck found that the animals themselves made up the story regardless of plans.

Upon returning, Buck convinced Van Beuren that the footage could best form a feature-length movie, and in 1932 BRING 'EM BACK ALIVE became one of the most popular pictures of the year. Buck proved not only to be a raconteur on the printed page, but with his experience on the stage and as a showman from his youth capably played the starring role and proved the perfect narrator. He introduced the picture personally to audiences during its New York first run.

Just as the success of the book prompted a follow-up, entitled Wild Cargo, by 1934 a second picture was produced under this title, shot in Ceylon, Sumatra, Malaya and northern India. This time, the emphasis on battles between animals was replaced with the ingenious methods used to capture them, and WILD CARGO was again profitable.

Buck was very much a man of his time who embodied many of the attitudes of an era. There are occasional lapses from today's perspective, such as the references to his native assistants as his "boys"--a problematic designation he does explain in his books. Parts of his documentaries were indeed staged, but no more than was usual then, or now, to reconstruct actual events. Overall Buck promoted a sympathetic understanding of Asian wildlife--and people--at a time when both were still a novelty to Western eyes.

Buck's third book was entitled Fang and Claw, concentrating on the people of the far east that he had known, and in 1935 he directed a film of the same title that had little in common with the book. In contrast to the excitement of the first two movies, FANG AND CLAW was less spontaneous and planned to concentrate on the more prosaic aspects of Buck's business. Animals are both sought and found unexpectedly, making cages on the spot and building temporary overnight camps. There is less variation in the wildlife, as he twice captures a python, and shoots two tigers--one to save a rhino he was trailing, and the other felled to save a native. There are pronounced contrasts between life in the wild and in camp, as a honey bear and monkey waiting in camp prove to be reliably amusing and anthropomorphic, displaying an aptitude for getting into trouble.

As the third documentary, FANG AND CLAW was less intriguing to critics and audiences who recalled the previous ventures. Censors had clamped down on scenes revealing the violence in the animal kingdom. However, these same aspects caused Fang and Claw to be the first of Buck's films promoted to youth as learning tools by the National Education Association.

By this time, Buck had secured a firm position as an American hero. The market offered Frank Buck medals, letter openers, pith helmets, giraffe pins, rings, neckerchiefs, brooch and jewelry, bracelet, knife, soap, pencil boxes, watches, and games. His endorsement was sought for such products as tires, guns, whisky, food, automobiles, toys, clothing, and cigarettes. In addition, he told his stories over the radio, and was portrayed by actors on the air. He was also back in business importing animals for zoos. Buck could be seen in person at circus performances, and mounted important exhibits of his live animals, most notably at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. He went on the lecture circuit with his documentary footage. What makes his utilization of all these media all the more amazing is that he was a commodity, rather than a producer or distributor, such as a Walt Disney, in a time when different media outlets were all separate companies.

FANG AND CLAW was the first of several Buck projects to reveal an increasing emphasis on the importance of children to Buck's audience. They could collect "Bring 'em Back Alive" bubblegum cards, read of Buck's exploits in the pages of the Sunday comics, and join the Frank Buck Adventurer's Club after listening to his radio show. In 1935 Buck lent his name to a "Big Little book," then wrote a novel for youth, Tim Thompson in the Jungle, based on a character who had appeared on his radio show. This was followed by a nonfiction volume directed at the school market, On Jungle Trails, in 1936.

After appearing in three documentaries, Buck was eager to try playing a role in a fictional adventure movie in Hollywood. Buck moved beyond the realm of documentaries in 1937 when he starred in Columbia Pictures's first movie serial, JUNGLE MENACE, playing an animal trapper named Frank Hardy. (The picture was published as a novel by Charles Lawton, and subsequently released in a feature version, retitled JUNGLE TERROR.)

With the coming of World War II, Buck's business with wild animals based in Asia had to be abandoned for the duration. There were two final volumes of reminiscences, Animals Are Like That! in 1939 and an autobiography, All in a Lifetime, in 1941. That same year, he edited parts of BRING 'EM BACK ALIVE, WILD CARGO, and FANG AND CLAW into a new condensation entitled JUNGLE CAVALCADE.

During the war, Buck took roles in two more pictures. JACARE--KILLER OF THE AMAZON, was a documentary set in South America, a land he had not actively traveled in since the beginning of his career. In TIGER FANGS, Buck takes on a role similar to the one he had already enacted in JUNGLE MENACE, except this time he explicitly plays himself, rather than a facsimile. Cast in a fictional espionage tale, Buck is portrayed as flying to Penang where he is continuing in business despite the war and meets his assistant Ali (not played by the actual individual shown in the Buck documentaries). Visiting a rubber plantation, Buck finds the district terrorized by crazed tigers. A nearby animal trader is trapping tigers, then releasing them, and doing the same with other animals stored in his care, always after an assistant shoots them with a drugged dart. Buck uncovers the scheme, the evildoers are killed by one of the darts and an elephant stampede, and Buck gets the tigers he needs to take back to America. The lessons embodied in Buck's documentaries remain in this jungle adventure tinged with overtones of World War II; Buck builds a cage in the wild with Ali, and castigates a native for abusing a tiger in captivity. The animals are shown as only vicious when provoked. TIGER FANGS was one of the most lavish productions of Producer's Releasing Corporation, with a large cast of stars (including Duncan Renaldo, June Duprez, and J. Farrell MacDonald), elegant sets for a low-budget picture, and credible stock footage of animals. Buck himself proves a surprisingly good actor, particularly given some of the excessively melodramatic lines. (Ironically, it was this fictionalized view of Buck, as secret agent rather than naturalist, that was emulated in the 1982 television series, BRING 'EM BACK ALIVE, with Bruce Boxleitner playing Buck.)

Had TIGER FANGS proved sufficiently popular, there was a potential for a series of similar films. However, apparently the movie did not reach this level of profitability. (In later years, a 400 foot version of TIGER FANGS was released for the home market.) A pilot for a new radio series called the FRANK BUCK'S JUNGLE QUIZ, opening him up to questions from children, also lacked the success of his earlier work in the medium. Buck's last book, Jungle Animals, was aimed at children and published in 1945.

In 1948 RKO reissued BRING 'EM BACK ALIVE and Buck's career underwent a brief renaissance. That year, Buck returned to his hometown of Gainesville, Texas, to dedicate the Frank Buck Zoo, still the only existing memorial to the man and his work. In 1949, he appeared again in a new film, this time opposite Abbott and Costello and Clyde Beatty in AFRICA SCREAMS--despite the fact that Africa was the continent with which Buck was least associated. In 1950, Buck was the subject of a series of comic books (and his books were celebrated subsequently in three "Classics Illustrated"), and performed briefly in an audio record for children. By then, however, he was in failing health, and died that year at age 66. Despite all the dangers Buck found himself in, his life ended not because of any wild animal, but from lung cancer caused by decades of cigarette smoking.

Buck and his slogan of "bring 'em back alive" were an important part of introducing two generations to progressive ideas about the environment and the animal kingdom. His stories remain just as enjoyable as ever, and last year a new anthology of the best of his writing was published in Buck's home state by Texas Tech University Press. Through his use of a multitude of media, including writing, films, radio, circus appearances, and exhibitions, Buck was an icon who epitomized an intelligent and conservation-minded interest in the wildlife of Asia.

M/B/RS staff member Brian Taves earned his Ph.D. in cinema-television from the University of Southern California and is the author of The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Films (University Press of Mississippi, 1993) and other books.