Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television.
I admit that I am someone who puts a lot of stock into verisimilitude in movies. I need to be able to see that something could happen in the world that is shown to us for me to be involved in the story. I can accept magic, and spaceships, and laser guns. I can even accept all of those in the same movie if I’m given a consistent world. When a film breaks with that, when it breaks the rules of the world that it presents, it tends to lose me a little bit. Samuel Fuller’s White Dog, a film so notorious that it was not officially fully released for more than two-and-a-half decades, is a rare exception to this. In this case, the message is more important than the fact that the people involved act in ways that don’t specifically make sense.
The notorious nature of White Dog is enough that it makes sense for me to offer a trigger warning on it: this is a movie that is directly about racism. This is not sanitized “racism is bad” like Driving Miss Daisy or even the “racism infects everything” of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. This is vicious and brutal, and while the film isn’t remotely pro-racism, it is shocking and unflinching and brutal. So, this being the case, you’ve been warned. Click on the link to continue reading if you’re up for it. If you’re not, no shame.
White Dog is a title with a double meaning. The dog in question is, in fact, a white German shepherd. It’s also a “white dog” in the sense that it has been trained specifically to attack Black people. This is precisely why the film was controversial—and despite the message, it’s understandable why many people objected to the film.
Young actress Julie (Kristy McNichol) hits a dog while driving home one night and takes the dog to the vet. She feels honor-bound to save the dog despite there being no identification on it, and she pays the vet bill and decides to keep the dog. Because we need to initially see the dog as protective, a rapist breaks into her house, but the dog attacks him. Good dog, we are led to think. When the dog runs off and attacks a man driving a street sweeper, we’re used to the fact that the dog is violent, but it likely doesn’t twig that this time, the inciting incident is the driver being black.
But the dog attacks again, this time an actress on a shoot with Julie. With this attack, Julie seeks out the help of an animal trainer named Carruthers (Burl Ives), who advises her to have the dog euthanized, which she is not yet willing to do, hoping that the dog can be retrained. The task is taken up by Keys (Paul Winfield), who works for Carruthers. He accepts the challenge of attempting to retrain the dog, with rules that only he deals with the dog, and that only he feeds the dog. The dog needs to learn that everything good comes from him.
So far, I get this and accept all of what is happening. My family is the type of people who treat pets like they are a part of the family. My mom had a dog once that developed cancer. Rather than putting him down, she had experimental surgery done on the dog, who went on to live another six or seven years, albeit with only half of his top jaw. So to this point, I completely understand Julie’s wanting to save the dog and Keys undertaking the challenge of retraining.
Where that lack of verisimilitude creeps in is when the dog breaks out of its cage and kills a Black man in a church. Keys, looking for the dog, finds the scene and clear evidence that the dog has killed someone. With this knowledge, Keys tranquilizes the dog and decides to keep training it, not reporting the cause of the man’s death. At this point, even Julie is ready for the dog to be euthanized, but Keys has a mission to burn the learned racism out of the dog, essentially to demonstrate that it can be done. And it’s here that I think the film loses its connection with he real world, the actual message becoming more important than believability. And even here, our main characters—Julie, Carruthers, and Keys—are fully aware that they are on the hook if news of the dog’s behavior becomes known.
It's rare that I accept that in a movie, but it makes sense to do so in this case. White Dog is not a “racism is bad” movie, but one that states unequivocally and unflinchingly that racism is a learned behavior, and that anything can be taught this kind of hate. The dog is an animal with no idea of what race is, let alone racism. If the dog can be trained to do this, how much can humans be trained to do the same?
This is a hell of a film. I tend to like Fuller as a director in general because Fuller goes to places overtly that other directors only hint at or show us in the shadows. White Dog is that movie, a movie that could only be made by someone who knew the consequences were going to happen (this was Fuller’s last film made in the U.S.; he left much like Michael Powell fled after making Peeping Tom) but made it anyway. And for that, it’s a hell of a film.
Why to watch White Dog: It’s in your face in a way that most movies only dream of.
Why not to watch: It does break pretty hard with the real world.