I wondered how the dog could get loose, kill a man in a church, and yet somehow Winfield et al get another chance to reform it with no apparent community outcry to find the offending animal and destroy it as would and should be done in real life.
It's a movie. And FYI, that doesn't happen in the book. I know I mention the book a lot here, but having seen the movie (in a theater) and then read the book, I cannot seem to stop bringing up how much better the book is. The dog this story is based on never killed anybody. He got away from Romain Gary at one point, approached a stroller holding a black baby--and licked the kid's face. He was not a savage vicious killer, or a racist. He was just a dog who had been trained to do a job by some racist southern cops.
And there is little if any consideration of the consequences of shielding a proven killer animal. There was no question that they knew it was their white dog that did it. The mission to redeem the white dog comes ahead of the fact of a dead victim (even a severely mauled victim would be bad enough) and the unlimited potential for more.
Fuller obviously felt the book was too intellectual and talky, and didn't have enough action. He was going for sensationalism, and the dog had to really hurt somebody. The dog had to be this monster, this raging foamy-mouthed demon, who can get out of any enclosure, and wreak his brutality on the world. He had to be scary. That's how Fuller thought he could sell the movie. Fuller was all about immediate visceral sensations, in a word--emotion--he said so. In some French guy's movie.
At least McNichol does come around from a save the poor dog attitude to a realistic we had better destroy it attitude after cleaning her fill of human blood from its coat.
Yeah, but that just makes me despise her character (who is mainly just annoying)--the dog saved her from a rapist. She owes him. She could just give him to somebody in Idaho or Montana, who lives out in the middle of nowhere. But I guess in this movie, he'd get loose and somehow find the one black person within a thousand square miles.....
This is a very large loose end in the script required to get to the intended ending. That intended ending has some problems as well.
This is a recurring problem with movies adapting books based on real-life events. Which is that real-life events are rarely the best building blocks of popular cinema. And Fuller was always so expressionistic. Not that Gary's book is strictly fact either--he admitted to changing the story, for both artistic and legal reasons. But as a story, it holds together so much better. Fuller and Hanson just don't seem to be able to find a way to spackle the logical holes they create by changing the story around so radically.
Apparently, the idea is that the dog decides to turn on its racist master that it incorrectly identifies as Burl Ives who resembles the actor portraying the dog's actual owner, as if it were switching sides, or realizing how it had been used, or taking revenge for being trained for racist purposes, or in some other way demonstrating a level of intellectual abstraction for a dog that strains credibility.
I'll say this much--dogs do often mistake one person for another at a distance. I see this happen with my dog all the time--we're in the park, he thinks he sees his other person coming, and he loves her very much, so he starts trotting eagerly towards the approaching figure--then he gets close enough to see and smell better, and he hesitates, stops, then comes back--you can see him thinking "Well, I was certainly wrong there!" It can be a man he mistakes for her. They sense movement better than us, they have higher-definition vision than us, but their vision is near-useless for long-range personal identification purposes.
The climax in the book makes a lot more sense, because of who the dog attacks first, and why (and it's not because he's a savage demonic killer). But I don't want to give the ending away, if you haven't read it.
Of course, aggressive dogs go off in unexpected ways and times frequently without any moral to the story thus the ending is not impossible by any means once stripped of any moral or ethical meaning that can only be an invention of the writer or the audience.
You're missing the real problem. The explanation given for the dog starting to attack white people instead makes absolutely no damn sense. It would never happen. If you successfully train a dog to attack a certain type of person, he will attack that kind of person. If you successfully retrain him to stop attacking that type of person, he will stop attacking that type of person. Getting rid of his fear of black people would not make him attack white people. But Fuller and Hanson have a problem--their trainer is supposed to be an utterly admirable person. He's supposed to be a brilliant animal trainer. He's supposed to know what he's doing. He's supposed to be trying to retrain the dog to not attack anybody, ever. And yet there has to be a big violent ending to the movie. And of course the dog has to die. So they have to make something up out of whole cloth. Namely, the bizarre notion that retraining the dog may make him go crazy and do the precise opposite of what he was doing before. And that would never happen. A dog's mind doesn't work that way.
What I don't get is why they didn't have the Strother Martin lookalike who trained the dog to attack black people show up again, trying to get his dog back, and have the dog attack HIM. The audience deserves to see that guy get his throat ripped out, and the dog deserves a chance to take revenge on the man who ruined his life, and basically lied to him. I really think that is the single worst mistake in the film, once you've accepted its dubious premise (which again, works a lot better in the book). I don't think that would happen in real life either (though some dogs are a lot smarter than you think, and particularly Shepherds), but at least it would have the right symbolic resonance.
I still appreciate that Fuller does not permit a Hollywood ending
For an old school guy like Fuller, that IS a Hollywood ending. It didn't use to be that big popular movies couldn't have downer endings. Do you really think Gone with the Wind ends with Rhett leaving Scarlett because they respected the integrity of the novel? No, it ends that way because that's a HOLLYWOOD ENDING. Tragic endings are as Hollywood as you can get. It's how you do them that matters.
I mean, seriously--how many Sam Fuller movies have happy endings? It would actually have been a nice change of pace for him, I kind of think.
No, the ending is wrong. Just wrong. We're left with the message that nothing can ever really change or progress. That getting rid of one kind of hatred just brings out another. It's a senseless immoral ending, really. We went through all that for nothing. And Keys will just find another 'white dog' and start over. It's a visually powerful ending, but there's no sense behind it. And because the man who trained the dog only appears briefly, and is absent from the final scene, and actually never does or says a single racist thing in our presence, we're forced to identify the DOG with human racism. Instead of becoming a victim of racism, he becomes its living embodiment. And he's not racist at all. He's a dog.
In the novel, the dog is really the hero, in a sense. He breaks free from the humans who willfully misled him, and dies on his own terms, in the arms of somebody who cares about him. And inspires a very powerful anti-racist book that reached a lot of people back when it mattered. As Fuller's film never would have.
and the far worse drama and realism problems that would entail and that this movie is a good example of Fuller's style, values and skill.
But it's a far better showcase of his limitations. He is to be admired for having the nerve to take on racism directly, in the 50's and 60's, when it was still controversial. But in the 80's, we're forced to see that Fuller doesn't understand racism--and he doesn't really understand black people, either. That's why when the NAACP people came by, understandably concerned, he treated them like dirt. As if they had no right to be concerned. He could have sat down with them and explained why their fears were groundless, but instead he did the Fulleresque thing and told them to go to hell. Not smart, but he often wasn't.
Flaws and all, there is nothing here so inflammatory, controversial or extreme for its time that it could not have been released in 1980.
True. But it would have flopped no matter what. In a sense, it's better remembered now for having been 'censored'.
Oh, and it does not suck.
It's not a bad movie.
It's not a great one either.
And if you want a dog story that gets at the roots of racism, read Romain Gary's book, and forget the movie.
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un-7
14 years ago
You're missing the real problem. The explanation given for the dog starting to attack white people instead makes absolutely no damn sense. It would never happen. If you successfully train a dog to attack a certain type of person, he will attack that kind of person. If you successfully retrain him to stop attacking that type of person, he will stop attacking that type of person. Getting rid of his fear of black people would not make him attack white people.
The film does not suggest that there is some kind of reversal in the dog's racist training. Rather, the dog seems to have become mentally unhinged due to stress and simply attacks everyone in sight (starting with the black guy). Keys warns that this might happen earlier in the film: "Homicidal maniac. Will attack anyone in sight", or something to that effect. I suppose it backs down when it recognises Keys and Julie (as you said yourself, it wouldn't be likely to recognise them from a distance), but goes throug with the attack on Carruthers because it has no particular emotional bond with him. Of course, one may then wonder why this should happen now and why they let out the dog at a moment when it was so obviously agitated, but those are just another few in the long line of questions we may raise about the plot. I don't know if this makes sense in terms of real-world dog psychology, but at least it seems less far fetched than the idea of reversed racism.
No, the ending is wrong. Just wrong. We're left with the message that nothing can ever really change or progress. That getting rid of one kind of hatred just brings out another. It's a senseless immoral ending, really.
Agreed. It defeats the purpose of the entire film. If the NAACP people had anythig to upbraid Fuller about, this would be it.
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clyons
14 years ago
The film does not suggest that there is some kind of reversal in the dog's racist training.
Of course it does. The dog now attacks white men. The IMAGE is what matters, particularly in a film like this. But the script is so confused and disjointed that the image doesn't really resonate the way it should. It's a very badly written film with fine cinematography. The acting is mainly pretty bad, except for Winfield, who did far better work elsewhere.
Rather, the dog seems to have become mentally unhinged due to stress and simply attacks everyone in sight (starting with the black guy).
No, that's completely wrong. In the beginning, he only attacked people who were a threat to someone he liked, or black people just for being black. At the end, he's with a young white woman and a black man (who had abused him for weeks) and he's happy and friendly with them. Then he attacks an old white man who had never done anything to him. The implication may be that he's making a connection between this old man and the old man who trained him, but it just doesn't work.
The overall implication--which the script tries to justify in a very strained contrived way--is that the stress of the retraining process is putting him in a mentally vulnerable state where he could snap at any moment, and the idea is that in this state, he suddenly reverses poles and develops a hatred for white men, particularly those who resemble his former trainer. Any dog trainer would laugh this idea to scorn. Dog's don't think or perceive the world like that.
In the novel, the dog starts attacking white people because he was SPECIFICALLY trained to do so by a black man who has been scarred by white racism. In the end, he's just too trusting of his handlers, white or black--he's just trying to do his job, which is a very German Shepherd thing--Gary suggests that when he realized he was mauling somebody he loved on behalf of somebody else he loved, the shock broke his spirit--his 'god' has failed him. That may not be entirely realistic canine psychology either, but at least Gary was writing from his own experiences and perceptions--he wasn't just making **** up.
Keys warns that this might happen earlier in the film: "Homicidal maniac. Will attack anyone in sight", or something to that effect.
But he doesn't. We sees that he doesn't. He's fine with every white person he meets, except a rapist who invades the house of a woman who was nice to him.
Agreed. It defeats the purpose of the entire film. If the NAACP people had anythig to upbraid Fuller about, this would be it.
They never even got to see the film. We only have Fuller's account of what happened there. Without hearing their side of the story, it would be kinda racist to assume anything about what they did or should have upbraided him for. The fact is, Fuller had noble intentions regarding race relations, but a very mixed record. A lot of his anti-racist films are actually pretty damn racist.
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