![]() (Accounts vary over whether it drowned because it broke its back in the fall, or because it panicked when it hit the water.) After widespread protests, the Motion Picture Association Of America agreed to let the AHA establish guidelines for the use of animals in films, and oversee filming to ensure compliance. But just one jump was enough to kill the horse. Their fall was shot twice from different angles and cut into the film in sequence, so it would look like both brothers made the dangerous leap. The stunt involved dumping an unwilling horse out of a chute and having a stuntman jump after it. One of Jesse James’ stunts involved Frank James (Henry Fonda) and his brother Jesse (Tyrone Power) escaping a posse by riding their horses off a tall cliff and into a river. But these days, it’s largely just remembered as the film that got the American Humane Association involved in filmmaking. Jesse James (1939) Jesse James was one of the biggest hits of 1939, matching the take of Frank Capra’s hit Mr. ![]() Eason intended to make the races as real as possible, offering a bonus to the winning driver and whipping the crowd of extras into a genuine frenzy, which apparently continued unabated even after some were nearly killed by a flying horseshoe.Ĥ. Reeves “Breezy” Eason-whose nickname derived from his fast shooting methods, which unfortunately included a lax attitude toward on-set safety-the race sequences claimed the lives of a human stuntman and at least five horses. Ben-Hur (1925) With their whirling, Batmobile-style wheel-destroyers, the chariot races in 1959’s Ben-Hur still stun audiences 50 years after the fact, but they’re nowhere near as dangerous as the scenes in the 1925 version. Instead of coming out to see elephants perform at the circus, audiences flocked to newfangled touring cinema sideshows to see one die on film over and over.ģ. “Electrocuting An Elephant” signals a shift in conceptions of mass entertainment at the turn of the last century. Though electrocution was arguably more “humane” (and cinematic), Edison’s ulterior motive was to trump up the effectiveness of his own high-voltage direct-current system. (The attacks seemed at least a bit retaliatory, since one was prompted by one of Topsy’s trainers trying to feed her a lit cigarette.) Edison intervened, suggesting electrocution instead. After being deemed a threat to people due to a few attacks, Topsy was sentenced to death by hanging. Topsy was a circus elephant that worked on Coney Island’s Luna Park. But Thomas Edison’s 1903 short “Electrocuting An Elephant” is worth mentioning, since it chronicles an animal death at least partly orchestrated for the sake of a paying audience. ![]() ![]() So we largely excluded cases where animal killings were captured in documentary films, like Roger & Me or The Cove. “Electrocuting An Elephant” (1903) This list is meant not as a grim catalog of animal abuse for its own sake, but as a list of accidental or deliberate harm done to animals in the process of creating filmed entertainment. ![]()
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