Probably the best movie i've seen this year

I must be psychic. Or bored.

You are missing the meat of the film clyons.

I'm a vegetarian. thinkam.

It's the dog.

The dog who is portrayed as an evil monster that actively seeks out black people to kill, even though the dog he's based on never did that, and doesn't seem to have even seriously mauled anyone but two white people.

This movie didn't need to confront racism directly. That isn't what the story is about.

I agree. I just don't APPROVE.

It is about the dog and those who wished to "cure" it...which was and IS a new direction for a movie concerning racism.

No it isn't. Joseph L. Mankiewicz covered similar terrain in "No Way Out", back in 1950. With humans. Sidney Poitier plays a doctor who tries to make a working class white racist played by Richard Widmark see that his hatred is misdirected and pointless. In 1950. No canine metaphor needed. It's on TCM pretty regularly, btw.

It is dealing with the training of racism...the origin.

Which is why we never see the dog being trained to be racist, and we see the guy who trained him for a few minutes of the film? And as I've mentioned before, there's nothing in the book about how exactly the dog was trained (Gary never found out), and Fuller basically made up what we hear in the film. You would not need to hire black junkies to abuse a dog to make a dog aggressive to black people. I mean, do you think Nazis hired Jews to abuse their German Shepherds? The dog picks up on what his handler feels. He believes what he's told by people he trusts. There IS a good metaphor for racism in there, but it wasn't well handled in the film.

It is dealing with dogs as a real living breathing avatar manifested with our own behaviors. Just like our children. There is no strained metaphor. We as human beings can be manipulated and trained just as easily as dogs and any other "lower" animal. That is as direct as it gets.

I think a black doctor played by Sidney Poitier facing a white working racist thug played by Richard Widmark--in 1950--is a little more direct.

You watch the dog doing what comes naturally.

You don't know much about dogs, do you?

It isn't evil and it isn't even a bad dog under ordinary circumstances. It simply had extraordinarily nasty training to believe a certain thing about its world.

Again, there's no reason to think that kind of training was actually used to make 'white dogs'. You can't teach people by lying to them. And you can't make racists stop training dogs to be 'racist' by retraining one dog. That's a major flaw in the film's logic. Keyes' rationale for being so cruel to the dog--and for covering up how his behavior has caused the death and maiming of other black people--makes no sense at all. It wouldn't work. And in 1980, there was no crisis of racist dogs running around killing black people. There weren't even racist PEOPLE doing that anymore. Jim Crow was dead. Fuller is fighting a battle that's already over. There were new battles to be fought against racism, but he was not the man to fight them. He was always a day late and a dollar short in this regard. When you look more closely at Hollywood films from the 1950's onward, you realize that he was just imitating--often badly--what bigger and more respected filmmakers had already done with this subject. He was original as a stylist, but not in terms of content.

Then the story turns to people who actually care enough to try and cure this like a disease...a clinical, scientific approach.

Okay, first of all--there is no 'white dog' disease. There are no racist dogs running around mauling black people by themselves, and ANY dog can be trained to attack anyone you want him to, if you know how. The real dog was trained by a southern policeman, according to Gary's book--now wouldn't THAT have been a nice subversive twist? But Fuller wimps out. He makes the trainer this old doddering southern cliche--just about every real white American racist out there would look at this guy and say "That's nothing like me." Even the ones who are old doddering southern cliches. That's not how you reach people--that's how you tell people who already agree with you what they want to hear--that racism is about THEM--it has nothing to do with US.

Secondly of all--retraining this dog isn't going to stop racists from training dogs to dislike black people. So even if Keyes had managed to keep the dog from escaping the compound--which did not happen in real life--then methodically hunting down and killing a black man in a church--which did not happen in real life--and then covering it up so he could continue working with the dog--which ditto--even if everything had gone exactly according to plan, and the dog got on 60 Minutes, and everybody said "How wonderful", white racists would go right on being white racists, and their dogs would go right on assuming there must be some good reason for them not liking this type of human. And anyway, dogs are not the weapon of choice for most racists, are they? And you can't retrain a gun, can you?

Thirdly of all--since dogs can't really be racist the way we are, learning how to recondition a dog conditioned to react aggressively to blacks is hardly going to teach you how to retrain a human being--it's a symbolic victory, nothing more, which is how Gary approaches it in his semi-autobiographical novel. He knows it won't fix anything, or help anyone, but he feels badly FOR THE DOG--he thinks animals are worthwhile in their own right, and he feels it was a horrible betrayal of the human/dog relationship to make a dog into a mirror of our insanity. So he hands the dog over to a black trainer with anger issues, and it turns out that was the worst possible thing he could have done for the dog. But even so, the dog never mauled a single black person, best as he knew.

Only we find out there is no cure. Once the damage is done, there is no going back.

Only in real life, the dog was retrained to like and accept and OBEY black people in a few weeks. Unfortunately, according to Gary, he was then retrained to attack white people. Humans are much harder than dogs, but a lot of men and women raised to be racist have managed to recognize they were wrong, and some have risked their lives to speak out against racism, or have gone undercover to help the authorities fight violent hate groups. So the movie's final conclusion is not only depressing--it's a LIE.

Obviously there are people who still need access to these lessons because racism is every bit as alive and well now as it was in 1982 and anyone is fooling themselves if they think it isn't.

It's certainly still alive, and even enjoying a bit of a comeback--but honestly--if you think it's just as strong as before, with a black President in the White House, you're kidding yourself. And the funny thing is, I get the distinct impression you WANT to believe it's just as strong as ever, and absolutely nothing has changed. Why is that?

I appreciated the script for Crash and I did feel it was directed and edited quite well but it is too melodramatic for these purposes.

And if you think Crash is the only alternative to White Dog as a corrective for racism, you are ignorant about film.

You can't make a movie like this with a racist human antagonist in the story and expect the general audience to have any sympathy at all for him like you can have for this dog.

You never saw "All in the Family"? It was the #1 show for years, meathead!

It is surprisingly effective on that level as well.

Because it persuaded you of something you already believed?

Part of the value of this is to expand that concept from the dog and place it in the human world.

Which is what Romain Gary did--in 1969--when it mattered--and even then, he knew he couldn't make it mainly about the dog. He started with the dog, and then started looking at HUMANS. In the end, the dog is the only person in the novel we can be sure ISN'T racist. With perhaps two exceptions. Why don't you read it and find out?

Can we be compassionate towards the racist human who was raised in hatred, distrust and fear?

I don't think there actually is much compassion for the dog in the movie. I also think that if you believe there is, you probably shouldn't have a dog.

It isn't an environment where compassion exists at all,

WE NEVER SEE THAT ENVIRONMENT IN THE MOVIE. WE BARELY EVEN MEET THE DOG'S RACIST FORMER TRAINER.

so at that point there can be no surprise that racism continues to perpetuate itself. It exists in hate, distrust and fear and it is viewed with and reacted upon by hate, distrust and fear. No matter what side of it you are on, it is a cycle that feeds itself.

But there aren't two sides in the movie. There's only one. We meet ONE racist dog, who is treated as a bloodthirsty demon most of the time. We meet ONE racist man, who is barely even in the movie, and certainly there is no attempt to portray him sympathetically. Nobody else in the movie is racist at all. Keys doesn't seem to have suffered from racism in his own life--though of course a black man of his generation would have--there's no portrayal of white and black people being at odds--everybody's happy with everybody else. It's just this one old man, and this one old dog--who gets shot--for attacking a white guy. He can't win.

I wouldn't say White Dog is the single best anti racism movie ever made,

Well good, because it's not in the Top 100.

but I can definitely say I haven't seen any that were better in the last 30 years since this was released.

If you mean major Hollywood films, well guess what--this was never going to be that. It was a low budget exploitation film with a kind of artsy gloss on it. If it had been released back then, very few people would have ever seen it.

Mainstream Hollywood has been wary of tackling racism directly since the civil rights struggle ended. No question, we are cowards about race, as our black attorney general recently said. We don't want to bring up past unpleasantness, and since most overt discrimination and oppression is gone from America, and white people are starting to realize someday THEY'LL be the minority here, and Will Smith is the biggest movie star in the world doing dumb action flicks that would have previously been done by Tom Cruise, it's just harder to get a handle on it.

But I'm going to suggest to you that you haven't seen most of the movies about racism made in the last 30 years. Just like you didn't see most of the movies made about racism in the 30 years BEFORE White Dog was made. So without a proper grounding in what was actually done, you can't really make an informed judgment on White Dog's contribution. And I'm not saying it didn't make one. But it could have made a much bigger and better one if it had not strayed so far and so stupidly from the book. And that's certainly in the tradition of mainstream Hollywood, isn't it?

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