Question About the Ending... (SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!)

Well the Dog reacts entirely on the basis of what he sees.

Which would make him truly unique among his species, which reacts much more to smell than sight.

He's been conditioned on the basis of differentiating visually

Conditioning can't change natural instincts, merely shape them. And it certainly can't change the fact that dogs are colorblind. Their visual apparatus is secondary, though important. It's a bit of a taboo subject still, but black and white people have certain chemical differences in their sweat, and a dog would respond much more to that. However, the dog would still think of black humans as humans. As Frederick Douglass once pointed out, even a dog in the street knows a black man is a man, no matter what white people may delude themselves into thinking.

and Paul Winfield's character de-programmes him by introducing and confusing the safe visual schema the dog is used to.

I haven't seen the film in a while, but I don't seem to recall any reference to that. He does what the trainer in the novel does, which is use a protective suit to fight the dog, and wear him down, to the point where he becomes desensitized to the presence of black people--and of course he also withholds food, so that the dog will be hungry enough to accept food from a black man. I may be forgetting some embellishments in the script, but in short, the training regimen you describe would be totally ineffectual. Dogs respond to visual stimuli, but not in that way.

You can say, academically speaking, the dog represents one-dimensional black-and-white approach to films whereby white is good and black is otherwise and what Keyes does is to show the complexity in that.

No, Gary shows the complexity, Fuller is the one who boils it down to black and white--even to the point of making the dog a White German Shepherd, which the real dog was not.

Don't forget the scene where the girl is attacked on the film set.

I do remember that, but I don't think it makes the film about cinema--as you say, it takes place in Hollywood, and the characters mainly work in film (even the trainers), but I don't think there's a consistent enough approach to this to make it an effective commentary in this regard.

This is part of Fuller's cinema - Verboten(where a kid learns about the Holocaust after seeing a newsreel) and The Naked Kiss(clearly referred to here).

I obviously agree that there are many things consistent with Fuller's earlier work. But I think you're overemphasizing this, to try and make the film into more than it really is, or could be.

It isn't? The protests that began after hearing the initial ideas and stories were leaked out(and in Hollywood parlance, allowed to be leaked out) were intended by Simpson to make the film into a big commercial success since audiences would wonder if the film was that notorious or not. Similar to The Passion of the Christ where the film became a box-office success because people wanted to know about the violence and the alleged anti-semtism. The kind of film Simpson expected and what he had people expecting was a thriller with lots of violence and maybe some sex.

But then why not just give it a limited release? It's an artfilm, so release it as an artfilm. It could never have been a mainstream hit. I find the comparisons with Cujo really idiotic--not as idiotic as Cujo itself, of course. The notion that it could have resurrected Fuller's career if given a decent release (as it should have been given) is simply not realistic. Fuller was a dinosaur in the film industry of that time--in fact, you see hints of his realization of that fact in White Dog--the Burl Ives character--a relic of an earlier (and superior) era of filmmaking.

Our point of difference here is that you're saying nobody was concerned about the script being racist--but then you say that people were concerned about it--about images in the film that involved black people being savagely attacked just for being black--and by a dog. People mainly understood the film was not a pro-racist statement--the novel was certainly widely recognized to be an indictment of racism--but some felt the images would speak louder than the intent.

I disagree with the censorship, but the fears were understandable. After all, D.W. Griffith was quite certain there was nothing racist about Birth of a Nation, and didn't understand why it upset black people so much. In his mind, he'd gone out of his way to moderate the racial animus of Dixon's novel, and to show positive black characters (played by white actors in black face).

Simpson needn't even worry about backlash since he knew that the(then) mainstream took a
"minority's" protest for granted. The only time protests and demonstrations have effect is when it's the mainstream WASP that gets offended as in The Last Temptation of Christ.

The NAACP sent an observer to monitor the making of White Dog. Fuller describes how angry and offended he was by this, and he basically threw the guy off the set. There's no question that this kind of thing didn't help the movie. Fuller should have been more understanding of how black people didn't entirely trust white filmmakers. This was, after all, the first time he'd ever made a black man the hero of one of his films--John Ford had done that decades before, with Sergeant Rutledge, and of course Sidney Poitier had become a major leading man, and won the Oscar, in the same period when Fuller was making films that occasionally alluded to the race problem, but never really said much about it. There had been many many major Hollywood films that tackled racism far more directly and successfully before White Dog came out. Even one with a dog in it--who loved his black sharecropper family, and was a living symbol of their pride and loyalty. You've never seen "Sounder"?

Fuller was making a movie that wasn't attacking racism so much as exploiting it for shock value--the image of a racist dog attacking black people. Of course his intentions were good. But he shouldn't have asked black people to take that on faith--he was rude and dismissive of perfectly natural concerns. And I don't buy the explanation of how the film got pulled--Fuller made a movie with extremely vivid violent imagery. It was not an intellectual treatise. But neither was it terribly commercial, and this was probably the real concern.

He already did in The Steel Helmet(the very first American film to mention it by the way ).

And a movie I have long wished to see. But we're talking about The Crimson Kimino, which I have seen, and which I do not consider a terribly effective or relevant anti-racist statement, because it doesn't actually show any racism, except from the Japanese American protagonist. But at least there was a Japanese American protagonist. Btw, there had been Hollywood films about Japanese men having romantic relationships with white women back during the silent era. Sessue Hayakawa played romantic leads. I give Fuller a lot of credit for what he did, but there's very little that he did FIRST.

And it isn't specified when James Shigeta's character immigrated to LA anyway.

This is a very weak response--obviously he was born and raised in the U.S., and was living there during WWII. And the film would make a lot more sense if it related his experiences during the war, and showed actual instances of white people being prejudiced against Japanese Americans, which it doesn't. It's really the same problem as White Dog--we hear how awful racism is, but we see very little actual racism.

And this film is about a love triangle, using wrongful internment as a motive would be very cheap and vulgar(something Fuller never was, despite the pulpiness of much of his films).

I don't see how that follows at all.

Didn't you see the dinner scene? Keyes talks about that and explains it.

Not convincingly, but we can agree to disagree. I mean, it's a movie. Movies are full of improbable characters, and certainly Sam Fuller movies. However, I think it would be more effective if Winfield's character was less of a paragon, and simply an animal trainer offended by somebody abusing the techniques of his trade. Which any decent trainer would be, regardless of race. It's not going to convince anybody who isn't already convinced, which makes it useless as an anti-racist statement.

It's the highpoint of the camaraderie between the three characters. As he himself says, "I didn't want to be tied down to the academic world."

This line of dialogue simply demonstrates that Fuller and Hanson realized they had created a character who needs to be explained away, and they do so rather clumsily and unconvincingly.

And they aren't ordinary animal trainers, they train animals for TV shows and movies and that costs a lot of money. Those guys are rich, hence the fact that they serve caviar to the heroine in that scene.

And yet Burl Ives laments that there's less and less use for them in the film biz, because of the increasing prevalence of special effects to replace real animals--and that, for me, was the best bit of dialogue in the movie.

Whereas Fuller is saying that it could be your nice ol'grandpa which is even more scary.

I just told you that in the book (which I must again point out you have not read), the man shows up with his grandchildren, and the very same point is made (much more subtly and non-stereotpyically), so that comes directly from Gary--it's not Fuller's idea. It's one of the few instances of a scene that is derived directly from the novel, albeit in a very altered form. And the man is a RETIRED POLICEMAN, not just somebody's grandpa. I don't really think it comes as any kind of revelation that racists can be grandfathers.

Respected members of society are a reflection of society.

Certainly.

Fuller's film is about individual responsibility and that each and every one of us have to be careful of our actions.

I really think the film is a lot more interesting than you make it sound with bromides like this.

Simply saying society is racist too is no justification for that grandfather's actions.

Simply saying he personally is racist is no indictment of the rest of us, which is what the film should be doing. Racism isn't some aberration, nor is it uniquely American, or white. It's a human problem, and all of humanity should be indicted--not a dog. ONLY THE DOG IS PUNISHED.

What does unreliable even mean? He's an artist.

So was D.W. Griffith--in fact, a much greater and more influential cinematic artist than Fuller. That didn't stop him from making a film that is still being sold on racist websites as propaganda.

So White Dog is not an accurate portrait of animal training, what's important is what the film says, it's style and vision.

And judged purely on that basis, it's an interesting piece of work, but ultimately a failure--ironically, it's reputation has been enhanced all these years by the fact that it was almost impossible to see. I still think it's very much worth seeing for a film buff.

But Gary's book has more to say to the Age of Obama than Fuller's film. It has more to say about racism, more to say about how to fight it, more to say about how we all have the potential for racism in us, and it also manages to give a pretty accurate portrayal of dog training.

Fuller was a remarkable man--and so was Gary, who Fuller knew and admired, as a man and an artist. They had a lot in common--two tough Jewish guys who were constantly getting into trouble, and had fought the Nazis in WWII. But Gary actually experienced the Holocaust. He had been in a concentration camp. He had fought in the French Resistance.

Fuller's admirable service in The Big Red One didn't give him the same perspective--and it must be said, Fuller just didn't have much intellectual heft, though he was an extremely bright person. He was mainly self-educated, and that gives his films a refreshing pugnacity and directness--but also makes them very naive--modern audiences often giggle at his dialogue--at times he approaches unintentional camp.

Gary was a much more sophisticated and well-educated man than Fuller--and perhaps in part because of this, a much less happy one, which is why he didn't live to see (and critique) this very free adaption of his book. He saw life too clearly to be able to bear it. The ability to clearly perceive reality is not always a blessing.

Fuller's very American naivete (not saying all of us are naive) is not a negative thing in itself, but it does mean you have to take him with a grain of salt. You have to love him for who he is, warts and all--he shows you who he is in his films. And he was a remarkable person, and a filmmaker of great integrity and personal vision. However, very few of his films completely hold up to close scrutiny today. And White Dog isn't one of them.

I have seen White Dog in a theater--THEN I was moved to read the book it was loosely based on. I find the book entirely superior, as a work of art, as well as a commentary on racism. You are free to disagree. Once you have actually read the book.

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