A strange breed indeed. Co-written and directed by Samuel Fuller, (The Naked Kiss, The Big Red One), White Dog is at turns dangerously raw and painfully preachy, a racism PSA delivered with Fuller’s signature, in-your-face style. Kristy McNichol plays an aspiring actress who takes in a stray German shepherd only to discover, to her horror, that it has been trained as a “white dog”―to attack people with dark skin. At a private zoo that provides animals to Hollywood productions (run by Burl Ives!), she meets a trainer (Paul Winfield) who has made it his life’s work to deprogram such animals. But that may be a losing cause. The parallels to racism of the human variety are all on the surface, yet Fuller still gives the movie a vicious streak that keeps things interesting. The dog itself is never anthropomorphized, and therefore remains a snarling threat even as you’re rooting for it to reform. The attacks, meanwhile, are sudden and bloody, with the camera often in the middle of the teeth. (Fuller balances this with frequent close-ups of the dog’s eyes, so that it is always simultaneously monster and victim.) There is no denying that the acting is uniformly terrible (yes, even Ives), and the Ennio Morricone score seems a bit out of place. But White Dog remains remarkable not only for its boldness in tackling a “touchy” subject, but also for the way it goes for the jugular while doing it.
