White Dog

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****½

One of the most famous unknown films of all time finally comes out of the shadows of bootleggery and gets the Criterion treatment. Samuel Fuller's White Dog, a story about the re-programming of a dog that's been trained to attack black people, was considered such volatile subject matter in 1982 that the NAACP threatened boycotts while the film was still shooting. Paramount Studios eventually cowed and shelved the film entirely which only served to generate a long-lasting ignominy against Fuller. Eventually the director was forced to relocate to France where at the very least, people actually watch movies before labeling a film-maker as a virulent racist. Even then he was only able to make one more film, the extraordinarily bitter Street of No Return, about a great opera singer who has his throat cut out by powerful mobsters.

White Dog's genesis was nearly as seedy and tortured as its (to date) shelf life. Adapted from "Chien Blanc", Romain Gary's semi-autobiographical novel about he and his wife actress Jean Seberg's adoption of a stray dog that they later discovered had been trained to attack black people. Seberg became committed to curing the dog and Gary used the incident, as well as his wife's former involvement with the Black Panther movement, as a jumping off point to examine the need to quash bigotry. The story went through the usual studio channels (at one point set to be directed by Arthur Penn), eventually being assigned to Roman Polanski who had to abandon the project after fleeing criminal charges for sex with a minor. It was screenwriter Curtis Hanson (who would go on to direct Wonder Boys, L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile) who suggested the studio brass consider the legendary B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who'd had a minor hit with his World War II film The Big Red One. With a writers' strike looming, Paramount was confident Fuller could get a script in working shape and complete the film on time and on budget.

The film follows Julie Sawyer (played by eighties sweetheart Kristy McNichol) a struggling actress who hits a stray dog (an exceptional white German shepard "actor") swhile driving through the Hollywood hills one night, and forms a bond with it while she nurses it back to health. She becomes even more attached to the dog, after a (white) intruder breaks into her house and attacks her. The dog intervenes and in a spectacular action setpiece, tosses the would-be rapist out a window. But through a series of vicious and unprovoked attacks it becomes apparent this dog has been trained to view all black people as an imminent threat and she sets a course to have him re-trained. Unlike the real-life Seberg, Julie is apolitical but believing that racial hatred is something that can be unlearned she seeks out the help of an eccentric dog trainer Keys (played by Paul Winfield). From here the story shifts its focus to a more psychological portrait of Keys, a former academic who left loftier professional ambitions to find a cure for white people's vicious hatred vis-à-vis animal training.

The film's pulpy metaphor receives some levity from infusions of Fuller's dark sense of humor. In one scene an animal trainer (played by Burl Ives) throws syringe-darts at a poster of R2D2, declaring "there's the ENEMY!" A scene where a dog "plots" an escape from his cage has the playful quality of a Harold Lloyd film (aided by the score from legendary composer Ennio Morricone). And White Dog also contains what has to be the most tortured homage to True Grit in recorded cinema.

What Paramount failed to take into account when they hired Fuller was that he was the archetype for what Martin Scorsese would later describe as the "film-maker as smuggler", auteurs who use bombastic and offbeat conventions to deliver ideas otherwise too subversive for the mainstream. In a pre-Cujo but post-Benji world it's possible the studio was expecting something a bit more "date night", but of his twenty-three films White Dog easily has the most in common with Fuller's 1963 Shock Corridor. That film allegorized America as one big swarming mental institution and approached the topic of racism (along with many other taboo subjects) with typical grit and bluntness. In one scene Trent, a young, black student at the first integrated college in the South who's been institutionalized after a nervous breakdown, turns to face the camera and declares:

"I was brought up to have pride in my country--call it esprit de corps. It's inside me. I love it. It's even a blessing to love my country, even when it gives me ulcers. And those ulcers will stop the day all schools must get an education before being allowed to open their doors. I can't blame the students. They were brought up to hate the color of my skin; it's their blueprint for delinquency, the birth of lynching and the disease carried to those yet unborn. Those poor sick children were taught to depend on their parents' claws instead of their love."

In a post-Obama world it's easy to imagine White Dog being given renewed consideration. The film deals with the explosive subject of racism without defensiveness or rank paternalism but matter of factly as a societal ill that conscientious people must seek to end. Over twenty five years after its creation it still plays smarter and more sincere than much of the aspirational fluff that's come in the interim.

DVD extras include a 42-minute collection of interviews with screenwriter Hanson, Fuller's widow Christa Fuller and the film's producer Jon Davison which serves as a sort of de facto commentary of the development, production and aftermath of the film; an interview with on-set dog trainer; and a photo gallery.

See also: Carrie, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, The Great Dictator, Funny Games, White Fang, The First Films of Samuel Fuller.