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White Dog
I’ve used up all my tissues, and there’s still more serious issues
1982
Review: April 28, 2009
Director: Samuel Fuller
Starring: Kristy McNichol, Jameson Parker, Burl Ives
Up to you.
THE SETUP:
Woman inherits a dog that has been trained to attack blacks.
DISCUSSION:
I read about this movie in a year-end best-of while in San Francisco, and it sounded really fascinating and provocative. Plus, it’s from Samuel Fuller, purveyor of socially-conscious exploitation like Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, it’s in the Criterion Collection, and IT STARS KRISTY McNICHOL. So I got it! And it sat on my desk for three weeks because it sounded like a civics lesson. Which it kind of is, but at least it’s also entertaining.
We open with a nice gray-and-white credit sequence during which we discover that this was co-written by Fuller and Curtis Hanson, of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and L.A. Confidential. We also find that the score is by Ennio Morricone, and it turns out to be a very nice one. We hear a car swerve on a road, a dog yelp, and the picture comes on. Julie, that’s Kristy, was driving through the Hollywood hills like a reckless lunatic and hit this dog. She throws it in the car and takes it to a particularly pecuniary vet. They tell her to take it to the pound, where it’ll either be claimed or put to sleep in three days.
She can’t bear to see such a fine animal put to death—and at this moment the dog wakes up and looks at her—so she takes it home. She posts flyers, but ultimately hopes no one comes for him—and it is a HIM, by the way. One day she’s having trouble giving him his pills, so she takes one herself. He is flummoxed, then jumps up on her and stands over her—not exactly humping, but very sexual.
Well, it’s an eventful couple of days for Julie, because that night a guy breaks into her house and tries to rape her. The dog is downstairs watching TV [not kidding], so he initially doesn’t hear her. When he does, he attacks the guy, even leaping through a glass window, and secures him ‘til the police get there. He’s a heroic wonder-dog!
The next day the dog gets into her panties from the laundry—not her dresses, mind you, not her socks, but her panties—and won’t let go until it rips in half. She visits the animal shelter and sees all the sad doggies awaiting homes, and also sneaks behind the warnings to see a dog getting the gas chamber. She can’t stand to see that magnificent animal suffer the same fate!
But the dog runs away after a bunny, and while he’s out, attacks a black man in a garbage truck. The truck then goes out of control and crashes all the way through a clothing store! That’s why you’re glad it’s an exploitation movie, because there are going to be some gruesome deaths and truck crashes, not just socially-responsible heart-tugging messages. Julie gets him back all covered in blood—and doesn’t see a thing odd about that!
Julie then invites her boyfriend Roland around to celebrate something, and she has the candlelight on, some fine wine, some… Bagels? And EGG SALAD? They celebrate differently in California. She makes out with the boyfriend, but you know who doesn’t like that, and the dog gets up and jams his front paws into Roland’s crotch! Someone’s a little jealous, methinks.
So Julie is an actress, and she’s filming this scene where she and a black woman, Molly, are pretending to be in a gondola in Venice, with back-projected footage shown behind them. Julie has brought the dog, tied to the flimsiest of tethers, and he doesn’t like seeing her standing up there too close to no darkie. So he attacks her, and the movie suddenly goes a little De Palma-lite as we’re suddenly seeing Julie scream in slow motion as the footage behind her lazily strobes.
Roland tells her that he’s an attack dog—and raises the ire of the irritable pooch in the process—and says he has to be destroyed. But Julie, magnificent animal, etc. She believes he can be retrained!
So Julie takes the dog to Noah’s Ark animal training center, where they have several wild animals that receive much camera coverage. There she meets Martine Dawson, below, who just kind of struck me kind of funny. We never see her again after this one tiny part. She directs Julie to Carruthers, this plump fat redheaded man with a beard [played by BURL IVES!] who has a huge picture of R2D2 on his wall that he uses as a dartboard. This is because he normally trains animals for movies and he is quite sure that people want to see cute robots now, not cute animals, and he’ll be driven out of business. By R2D2. He says it’s almost impossible to retrain an attack dog—and when the dog attacks an African-American fellow right there, they realize that not only is he a white dog, but he’s a “white dog:” he’s been specially trained to attack blacks. Why, Julie just can’t believe that someone would ever DO that! Anyway, Carruthers tells her that although it’s impossible to retrain attack dogs, it’s totally impossible to retrain White Dogs. But who’s this? It’s the co-honcho of Noah’s Ark, Keys, and he’s black! And he’s going to take five weeks vacation from his duties at Noah’s Ark to retrain this dog! God damn it, he’s just GOT to!
SPOILERS > > >
So the dog goes into training, which is basically that Keys dresses in thick padding and lets the dog attack him until it realizes that it’s fruitless. He also comes out at night with a hamburger and will share it with the dog if the dog can be nice. This is where everything interesting about the movie pretty much ends, and we just have some Very Important Messages until the end. “How did he [the owner] turn him into a racist dog?” Julie asks, and Keys tells her that the guy hired blacks who were hard on their luck [winos, etc.] to beat the dog while he was a puppy [“A PUPPY!” squeals Julie], until he got to the point that he would attack blacks on sight. So all they have to do is get him to vote Obama, right? Not so simple, you see, because all of this is happening at such a deep subconscious level in the dog that if they do it wrong—and it has never been successfully done, btw—the dog could turn into a HOMICIDAL MANIAC, and attack EVERYONE!
“Even… ME?!” gasps Julie.
So the dog has been working at the top of his rusty old cage—you’d think they’d look into that—and handily escapes. He wanders around and attacks a black guy. The fellow seeks the sanctity of the CHURCH, but you see, even the house of the Lord is not strong enough to repel vicious attack dogs! Keys tranqs the dog and finds the body and feels a lot of anguish.
How about some PHILOSOPHY? Just a sprinkling? How about having a discussion on whether you kill the dog, which will just eradicate this one problem, or try to truly CHANGE the dog, which will… well, still only solve this one problem, but then they’ll have hope that not only can other White Dogs be retrained, but mankind can overcome racism! And it must be said that it is a kind of personal mission for Keys, who has made it his life’s work to battle worldwide racism by retraining White Dogs. It must also be observed that he has been 100% unsuccessful thus far, but you know, hope, etc.
Whew! Good thing the police don't investigate any brutal slayings in Los Angeles! Anyway, after a while the dog is friendly to Keys, and sure he snarls at this other black guy he doesn’t know, but ultimately is friendly to him. He’s CURED! So Julie runs off to pick him up, and there’s some old man outside with these two adorable little girls, and a Whitman’s Sampler. HE is the owner of the dog, and the one who trained him to be racist! Julie flings the box of chocolates [and like no shit, I mean—WHITMAN’S?] and tells the guy he’s a jerk and tells the girls that their grandfather is a terrible person! Oooh, got HIM!
She then leaves the racists in her dust and high-tails it to pick up her “99% cured” dog. The dog snarls and acts furious at Keys—until it gets near him, and calms down. Then he snarls and acts furious at Julie—this is the dog that is “cured” and ready for public, by the way—until, well, something happens. If you’re gonna watch the movie you might as well have some surprise. Then it ends.
< < < SPOILERS END
It was a solid C+. I would like someone from the Criterion Collection or whoever else to explain to me what’s so great about this film. The only parts I found interesting were the way the dog asserts sexual dominance over Julie and is subtly portrayed to be her new BF, defending against all other males that get near her, but this content abruptly ends halfway through, and turns out not really having anything to do with anything. In fact, Julie herself largely disappears during the second half, negating any chances we might have had that the movie would be REALLY provocative by comparing the white dog’s sexual dominance with perceptions of black male sexuality—woah, that would be incendiary.
But no, instead the movie plays faux-“provocative” by running through the same old, beat down hand-wringing exercises about racism, and how it is wrong. And frankly, call me a callous asshole, but two topics I never, ever want to hear another word about are racism and the holocaust. Okay, maybe if someone were able to say something interesting and of some depth about them, but for the most part what we get are the same old ABC Afterschool Special-level platitudes about them, and ya know what, I’ve heard it. You’ve heard it, she’s heard it, he’s heard it, every single person on the entire earth has HEARD IT. I had hoped this movie might find intriguing places to go with it and raise fascinating questions, but no, it’s the same old “racism is WRONG!” message, and worse, the film seems to feel like it doesn’t need to make any further effort, but can coast on the power of this platitude.
It also tries to generate a lot of thrills from the admittedly powerful image of the snarling dog, despite how this works against the film, as this dog is supposed to be “cured,” and, uh, that dog ain’t cured. Then again—how else are they going to generate thrills?
This film is definitely a victim of the principle that tells us that only the first two-thirds of most movies are interesting, as everything interesting about it abruptly stops halfway through. Also in that front section is a lot of technique to give psychological depth to the dog, which is pretty much dropped at the halfway mark. I sort of hoped we were going to see this dog go through some psychological struggle [and the canine actor definitely seems up for it], but no, it’s all black and white, as it were, from the halfway mark on.
It must be noted, however, that the score by Morricone is very nice, unexpectedly jazzy and reflective, and a key feature of the overall film.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
I think you could safely skip it, but it isn’t that bad.
