On the Trail of the Tigress is a silent American drama with a Belgian twist. The script was written by Olga Printzlau who also worked for Cecil B. DeMille and Clarence Brown, but the direction and the role of the hero were both in the hands of Paul Bourgeois (1888-1940). Bourgeois was also the big cat trainer behind the scenes. He was born in Brussels in 1888 under the name of Paul Sablon, but after his arrival in the US in 1912 he took on the name of Paul Bourgeois. A few years earlier Sablon/Bourgeois had launched himself into the film industry in the Netherlands He worked for Alfred Machin and Pathé as both cameraman and actor, appearing In Machin’s L’Or qui brûle as a young sailor who is ambushed in a burning ship. Because of his fearlessness and savoirfaire with wild animals, Sablon became the regular cameraman for Machin’s tiger Mimir. Once his work with Machin finished, he went to Paris and Hamburg and travelled for a while with the Circus Hagenbeck to improve his animal-taming technique. In the US, Bourgeois opened his own menageries in Detroit, Newark, Inglewood and Fort Lee. He remained active as animal trainer for various American film producers. Alice Guy, producer and scriptwriter of Beasts of the Jungle (1913) had fond memories of him: “Sometimes the studio resembled a menagerie, as wild animals furnished us with excellent material. The trainer Bourgeois brought me, one day, a magnificent tigress weighing 600 pounds. He assured me she was gentleness itself and begged me to caress her through the bars of her cage, to encourage the actors. I admit that I felt a certain hesitancy, but a director must not be a wet hen; I did the thing, and Princess received my advances very nicely, purring under the caress and rubbing against the bars like a great cat.”

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