Where is the follow-up when two black men were attacked?

Winfield's character says the way the dog was trained--as if this is a common thing, though we see no evidence of that--is to get a black junkie off the street, and offer him a fix in exchange for abusing a puppy.

That's a racist image. There's no reason to think that ever once happened.

I agree that image appealed to Fuller, but it wasn't an image that really worked in terms of addressing human racism. The fact is, the trainer in the book only needed a few weeks to completely retrain the dog to be friendly with black people. Gary believed he had retrained it to attack white people--the dog, who had been loving with him before, attacked him when he entered the trainer's house, but then recognized him, and ran away in anguish. There's no way to know what really happened. Gary often played games with the facts in his fiction. But I think most animal trainers would agree that it's a simple matter of reconditioning. In both the book and the film, the methods used were probably much more brutal than they had to be.

What Fuller's film suggests is that it's the animal in us that's racist--that's nonsense. Animals are never racist. That's a human thing--they don't have ideology. They can be prejudiced--prejudices are a necessary part of survival, sometimes. You can't stop to find out if the bear really wants to eat you. But what we've done is elevate prejudices to belief systems. No dog ever did that. So Fuller was wrong. But more than that, by making the dog represent racism throughout the film--without showing us a single racist white person until the very end--he's failing to make the statement he set out to make.

He did the same thing in The Crimson Kimono--supposedly an anti-racist film--but in the end, the only racist is the Japanese-American protagonist, who falsely believes white people hate him for being Japanese--he finally snaps out of it and realizes it's just in his mind. But in reality, of course, many people did have such prejudices--the internment camps for Japanese people in America aren't even mentioned. Fuller was trying to say "We were like this once, but we've moved past it now." Oh really?

Fuller wanted to be anti-racist, but the fact is, his films that deal with race are so unwilling to confront actual racism in the present day that they fail. On every level.

Park Row is actually one of his best scripts--he was writing from experience there, having been a newspaperman.

When he writes about racism, it's always from the outside. Obviously he knew racists in his life--he was in the army during WWII. But he doesn't seem to have known many black people.

Gary was married to one, as a young man. He was later married to Jean Seberg, who was involved in the civil rights movement. He himself knew quite a lot of black people, including some who were quite radical in their politics. And being an eastern European Jew raised as a Frenchman, he understood far better than Fuller what it means to be a minority--he could see it from all sides.

It's a big difference. Read the book. It's a vastly superior work.