The Incurable Weirdness of Racism

The unsettling thing about Sam Fuller’s White Dog (1982) is not that it depicts racism, but that it dispassionately examines its incurable weirdness like a patient etherized upon a table.

The patient’s malady is embodied in a large white German shepherd. The dog is introduced at the beginning when a young woman hits him with her car while driving at night. She takes the dog to a veterinarian for emergency treatment.

Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol) and her ‘four-legged time bomb’ in White Dog (1982).

The dog’s injuries are superficial. The woman, an aspiring actress named Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol), afterward takes the dog to her home in the Hollywood Hills. Julie and her boyfriend, Roland Grale (Jameson Parker), a young screenwriter, post local notices that she found the dog. The dog tends to be jealous for Julie’s attention; Roland becomes more favorably inclined toward this large rival with a healthy set of canine teeth after he deters a would-be rapist (Karl Lewis Miller) in Julie’s home and then holds the intruder outside until the police arrive.

A rampant German shepherd displays a healthy set of canine teeth in White Dog (1982).

So far, so good. But then a scene on Rodeo Drive shows viewers what Julie subsequently discovers after the dog viciously attacks Molly (Lynne Moody), an African-American actress, during a movie shoot. The dog strikes suddenly while Julie and Molly are saying their lines on a rocking Venetian gondola surrounded by a film crew in a movie studio. Roland warns Julie that the dog is ‘a four-legged time bomb’, but she believes that he can be trained. She takes him to Noah’s Ark, a business run by Carruthers and Keys, professional movie animal trainers, as a last resort to find someone who can help him.

Burl Ives as Carruthers and Paul Winfield as Keys in White Dog (1982).

Carruthers (Burl Ives) is a campy old showman who throws tranquilizer darts at a full-sized cardboard image of a ‘tin and flashing lights’ Star Wars robot. His claim to fame is that his hand doubled for John Wayne’s to defy rattlesnakes in True Grit. Lion-wrestling Keys (Paul Winfield) is a trained anthropologist who did not follow in the academic footsteps of his parents. ‘To me, this [training business] is the laboratory that Darwin himself would go ape over!’ Keys later tells Julie.

When Julie first meets Carruthers in his office and tells him her ‘problem’, he gravely explains that no one can train ‘an attack dog gone bad’. The muzzled dog stays calmly at heel in the office until he bolts into the yard outside to subdue one of Carruthers’s black employees.

Joe (Bob Minor) gets the business end of a dog in Sam Fuller’s White Dog (1982).

‘That ain’t no attack dog you got, that’s a White Dog!’ Carruthers said, pulling the dog off the man.

‘Of course he’s a white dog!’ Julie said.

A white dog indeed! Carruthers explains to Julie that a White Dog is a dog trained to hunt and attack black people. The ‘etherized patient’ to which we alluded at outset is that what appears inconceivable to a young white Angeleno like Julie is simply another fact of life to black men and a white animal trainer who knows dogs.

Joe (Bob Minor), the black man the dog attacked, pulls up his trouser leg to show the disbelieving Julie a large scar on his calf. ‘You see that scar, lady? I got that when I was just 14. A White Dog did it.’

Joe (Bob Minor) shows a disbelieving white dog owner what a White Dog can do.

Keys, who also is African-American, happens along after Carruthers restrains the dog. He confirms what the others tell Julie but dares disturb the universe by accepting the challenge of training the dog. McNichol stars in her first adult leading role, but Winfield carries the picture because the heart of the story follows his character’s effort and work to recondition the dog.

Paul Winfield’s animal trainer Keys carries the story in Sam Fuller’s White Dog (1982).

The dialog can be ham-handed, but the story is earnest without being didactic or sentimental. It is more like a newspaper story than a movie: Fuller did newspaper reporting from the South in the 1930s. On the other hand, although the film’s narrative focus is the White Dog, it is hard to believe that law enforcement and the news media would not have shown a more active concern about an animal serially mauling and killing citizens black or white.  

A black hand (Sam Laws) tests a White Dog’s training progress in White Dog (1982).

White Dog 1982 U.S. (90 minutes) Paramount/Criterion. Directed by Sam Fuller; screenplay by Fuller and Curtis Hanson, based on a story by and dedicated to Romain Gary; director of photography Bruce Surtees; production designer Brian Eatwell; edited by Bernard Gribble; music by Ennio Morricone; produced by Jon Davison.