The Criterion Collection website, excerpts an interview segment from Richard Schickel's episode on Samuel Fuller as part of his The Men Who Made The Movies.
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/934
As expected, it's hilarious and exciting to watch Fuller talk.
"Ça va by me, madame...Ça va by me!" - The Red Shoes
Thanks so much for the link; Fuller sounds like such an intelligent guy. I can't wait to check White Dog out.
"GOD--WAS--WRONG!"--James Mason, Bigger Than Life
It's really in the vein of the two Constance Towers films he made in the 60s - Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss. The premise is pulpy(although based on real life incidents) but it moves beyond that into a very poetic film.
I find it amazing how come Fuller never got his own talk-show.
"Ça va by me, madame...Ça va by me!" - The Red Shoes
If you compare it to The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor, I'm there; Fuller's treatment of the American Dream gone wrong, racism and repression is much better told (and has aged much better) than most of the self-righteous, "daring" films of A-list directors of Fuller's time, including Giant, Gentlemen's Agreement, The Defiant Ones and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, which all tackle big issues in polite, borderline whitewashing ways and lose their power over time. Fuller was pure pulp poetry on film.
"GOD--WAS--WRONG!"--James Mason, Bigger Than Life
The reason it has much in common with those two 60's films is that Fuller is really returning to his roots after a huge hiatus of almost twenty years. The Big Red One, his dream-film was a kind of anti-epic mosaic about his war experiences that was shot in Israel and in Ireland, and before that he basically drifted in TV and couldn't find much funding for his films, even if ironically this was the period which Fuller's reputation was being established by critics and film-makers and he was a kind of a resident Holy Man who people took pilgrimages to meet(and served as uncredited script doctor for Wenders and Bogdanovich among others).
White Dog brought Fuller to contemporary America which was always his closest subject, from the 50's(Pickup..., The Steel Helmet, Crimson Kimono) and 60's(the two films with Constance Towers). White Dog was a film intended by Fuller to re-establish himself in the commercial mainstream, instead it had the perfect opposite effect and essentially ended his career.
"Ça va by me, madame...Ça va by me!" - The Red Shoes
[deleted]
Interesting stuff--I hadn't heard before that he knew Romain Gary. He's kind of funny the way he briefly justifies why he threw out most of Gary's story--I really don't see what people sleeping with horses has to do with it.
His basic point--that the hero of the movie is retraining the dog because he wants to find a way to deprogram white dogs, so the KKK won't train any more--pretty damned silly.
There is no evidence presented in the film to make us believe the KKK used dogs trained to attack white people, and Fuller gives no indication he ever heard of them doing that--have you ever heard of that? How would they do that in the 1980's? Suppose the FBI comes calling, and one of the agents is black? You can't very well tell the dog to leave this particular black person alone, so you don't get arrested. Why would the KKK prefer dogs to guns or bombs? It makes no sense in the context of the film.
The dog in Gary's book was a POLICE DOG, trained in the 1960's, and isn't that a much more serious indictment of American racism? But hard to pull off in a contemporary context, and he probably couldn't afford to do a period film. And he wanted the black trainer played by the great Paul Winfield to be a completely admirable person, with very noble motives for putting the dog through hell, and risking human lives. So he had to make something up.
Suppose Keyes had succeeded--he found a way to recondition a dog trained to attack black people on sight. So what? Why would this deter the KKK from making 'racist' dogs, assuming they were, which we have no reason to think is the case.
Michael Vick is still doing jail time for training pit bulls to fight and kill other dogs, using really brutal methods. And in fact, most of the dogs that were taken from his property have been successfully rehabilitated, so that they're friendly with both people and other dogs. It wasn't actually that hard with most of them--the real problem with the dogs was that they were scared of their own shadows, because of the abuse they'd suffered.
Okay, so now we know it's possible to recondition pit bulls trained to attack and kill other dogs. It's a widely publicized fact.
So that means guys trying to make money through organized dogfighting won't train them anymore? Is anyone that naive? What difference would it make? If you don't HAVE the dog anymore, why would you worry about him being retrained? Only the dogs you actually had under your control would be relevant. Was Keyes trying to develop some kind of telepathic mind control over dogs he could use to recondition them at great distances?
It was the most nonsensical aspect of the whole film, other than the notion that if you retrained a dog to not attack black people, he'd go crazy and start attacking white people. No, he would damn well not, unless you specifically trained him to, and probably not even then, if he'd already been trained previously by white people. He'd just decide black people were okay now, and that would be that.
BECAUSE HE'S A DOG. Not a human.