This incident drew a great deal of attention from the public and anger against the filmmakers it appeared as though Congress was going to be spurred into action. The fall didn’t actually kill the horse (as, again, the drop wasn’t that steep), but the horse was so freaked out by the fall that it began thrashing wildly and ended up drowning itself. Then we cut to the brothers and their horses in the river getting away. A different angle of the first shot was then replayed right after to make it appear as if the other James brother also jumped off with his horse. Perspective was used to make a 70-foot drop seem higher, and then a stunt man jumped off of cliff along with a horse that was forced off using a slide mechanism. Their only way out is to jump with their horses from a cliff into a lake. In a dramatic scene toward the end of Jesse James, Frank and Jesse James are being chased by a posse. You see, in a 1939 film about Jesse James (starring Tyrone Power as Jesse James and Henry Fonda as his brother Frank), the filmmakers THREW A HORSE OFF OF A CLIFF! However, while there were films where more than a dozen horses were killed by this technique (the filming of the 1939 Erroll Flynn film The Charge of the Light Brigade saw more than two dozen horses killed by trip wires), it was the death of a single horse that finally pushed the film industry into allowing the American Humane Association to dictate how animals were treated. In particular, the use of trip wires (to tangle horses and show them dropping as if shot by guns or arrows) was protested. As time went by, the organization grew more insistent, especially as Westerns and war films increasingly popular, as both genres tended to treat horses as if they were taking part in actual battles. As soon as the film industry really began to take off in the 1920s, the American Humane Association sought oversight of its treatment of animals.
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