White Dog
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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White Dog (1982) is a drama movie directed by Samuel Fuller, featuring Paul Winfield, Kristy McNichol, Jameson Parker and Burl Ives, that went unreleased for years because of its theme and subject: that racism is taught and learned, not innate. The film’s score was provided by Ennio Morricone.
The film is very loosely based on a 1970 semi-autobiographical work by Romain Gary, where he describes, with a great deal of literary license, the events that unfolded after he took in a stray German Shepherd dog (Gary insisted the story of the dog was completely true).
The plot of the film centers on an unmarried woman (McNichol) who takes in a stray white German Shepherd dog for her protection. What she does not know is that a white racist trained it to attack Black people on sight. Faced with either having the dog killed or retrained, she takes it to a Black dog trainer (Winfield), who undertakes the dog’s re-education as a personal challenge. Some people feared that White Dog would be a celebration of the racist attacks, and hence was very controversial.
Gary's book was about racism in all its forms, including the racism of extremist black groups. It was depicted as a disease that can afflict anyone, regardless of race or nationality, and can even be inflicted on an innocent animal - who ultimately proves himself better than any of the people who trained him, white or black.
Fuller's film concentrated entirely on racism against black people, while depicting only one actual white racist (the overt racial turmoil of the 60's was long over at the time). He made the black dog trainer a far more sympathetic and admirable character than the man depicted in the book. In the film, the dog ends up as a living symbol of racism, and meets a different end than the real German Shepherd who inspired Gary's book (who was not of a white kind). In the book, there are many examples of human racism, and the dog is simply a victim, who never seriously harms any black people in the course of the story, does not wander around attacking blacks randomly, and proves to be safe around small black children, and quite retrainable - it is the trainers who are shown as being at fault, not the dog.
Fuller invented some details about how a 'white dog' is trained, and also the notion that retraining the dog to stop attacking black people could make him go insane and attack white people, which was a purely cinematic flourish, with no basis in reality, or Gary's book.
Gary's work shows a long interest and sympathy with animals; White Dog is the only Fuller movie where an animal plays any significant role. The latter also simplified the characters in the story, the dog included, to create more potent images of racism - while not actually talking about the realities of racism, or its origins.
The Criterion Collection released an edition of White Dog in December 2008.
