David O'ConnellWhite Dog
May 23rd 2011 06:48
When an actress from the Hollywood Hills, Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol,) runs over a dog in the dead of night she heads for a late night vet surgery to preserve its life. The dog, a striking white German Shepherd, survives and when notices posted at various spots around the community receive no reaction, she nurses him back to health herself.
It’s not too long before the dog’s secret talent rises malevolently to the surface. A late-night intruder gets more than he bargained for when breaking into Julie‘s home; the dog pounces with a scary ferocity, even propelling himself head-first through a window as if it were wet cardboard to finish off the retreating figure.
A second incident, when one of Julie‘s co-actors, a black woman, is attacked on-set in the middle of a take has Julie reviewing the wisdom of her decision to keep the mutt for herself. Her boyfriend (Jameson Parker) declares the dog a “four-legged timebomb”. An even harsher definition is reached when Julie takes the dog to 'Noah’s Ark', a compound on the edge of town overseen by the amiable Mr. Carruthers (Burl Ives). It is here that the resident trainer, a black man named Keys (Paul Winfield), attempts to reign in the innate recalcitrance of animals of all varieties.
Keys is able to gaze into the infected soul of this canine, declaring him a “white dog” - a reference not to the colour of its coat, but an ideological mindset ingrained into the creature from birth, a series of reactions assured via systematic beatings thought to be delivered by people specifically hired for this one purpose. In effect, the dog has been conditioned to attack people of colour alone.
Paul Winfield vs. White Dog
The scary implications of this declaration send Julie into denial initially but through experimentation Keys confirms the worst, prying open the inner demons that compel the dog to react in such a way. The reasonable response would be to send a bullet into its brain, of course, thus eliminating the danger. But Keys won’t hear of such a course of action; to him it would mean relenting to the irrationality of racism at large.
Fuller, a fringe-dwelling Hollywood renegade best known for films like the controversial Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964), has a ball inciting further controversy with what was one of his final works and one deemed unnecessarily exploitative upon release. At the heart of the film are the contentious queries it raises about the nature of racism and our attempts to circumvent its crippling after-effects on our way of life. Can racism be wrung from an individual like dishwater from a dirty rag? Can the poison ever be expunged from the mind through a systematic reconditioning of a belief system?
Regardless of how rational or objective you perceive Fuller’s themes to be, there’s no doubt that Keys becomes an imposing, defiant figure in response: a staunch resistor personifying society's desperate desire to stamp out hateful impulses, to confront the evil and deliver judgement through reason and understanding.
At one point we’re shown the dog using all its ingenuity to escape the compound; it then trawls the streets for a while, before visually tagging a black man who retreats into a church, only to be mauled to death before a wavering cross. A humanistic and Christian defilement is as severe as Fuller goes in expounding upon the sickening evil associated with racial abuse.
Fuller falls in love with slow-motion shots of the dog in close-up, teeth bared; especially so as he closes in on helpless prey. Though lacking in subtlety there’s an undeniable visceral thrill in the telling of this tale, despite some dubious acting from McNichol (who was around 20 at the time but, I swear to God, looks about 13!). The screenplay is credited to Fuller and a young director - unknown at the time - Curtis Hanson, from a story by Romain Gary (who had died two years prior to the film’s release in 1982).
Despite the skeletal fragility surrounding him, it's Winfield, at the film's core, who keeps Fuller’s blade honed. Keys’ unrelenting determination to never accede to a mindless foe whose animalistic resolve to rip him to shreds proves to be a stark personification of those railing against the prejudice of the world at large. Fuller also utilises Ennio Morricone's paradoxically wistful score to nice effect too; funnily enough, a keyboard phrase the maestro occasionally tacks on to the end of the much-used main theme sounds eeerily like one he would later use in Mike Nichols' widely reviled Wolf (1994).
There’s something deliriously and satisfyingly B-grade about White Dog; it’s a curiosity of sorts, no doubts, but one that still resonates with relevance and a capacity to chill. The scale of this mostly forgotten drama may seem reduced to the uncomfortably close proximity of an outlandish exercise in genre, but don’t be fooled, for the film's allegorical context is engaged with far deeper intentions. This is compelling entertainment, Sam Fuller style.
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Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
I love Fuller's work but my K-9 empathy tends to be over exaggerated to point where this one is sure to put me through the wringer.
Still another great review David
Comment by David O'Connell
Screen Fanatic