Aside from the 300 point font screaming headline, "HATE IS HERE TO STAY" that hovers over the central story, this time around I noticed how Fuller's cynicism manifested in all of the periphery interactions of Krsty McNichol's character. The movie opens with the nice young woman taking a dog she hit to a vet, where she's promptly treated with the assumption that she's not going to want to pay the vet bill. She's instructed to post "found dog" signs and ask for a reward because, as the nurse suggests, she's probably going to want her money back. No chance she took the dog in and would be willing to pay just because she's compassionate to living things? Then a man…

Samuel Fuller tackled the subject of racism throughout his career, and something about his brutish, direct approach holds up as a surprisingly thoughtful means of addressing the complex, corrosive sin at the heart of America. White Dog is to the point even by Fuller's standards, introducing a lovable if ferociously protective stray dog, only to reveal a mind conditioned to attack black people on sight. Fuller triangulates the beast with the innocent, naïve young white woman (Kristy McNichol) who rescued him and the black man (Paul Winfield) who attempts to retrain him, casting the dog as the manifestation of racism as mental disease, not inherently present but gradually formed through trauma and teaching.

But while there may be Fuller films…

“I fed Mr. Hyde” is the all-telling nature of the film White Dog. In what I would name as the American History X of dog movies, brings the story of a white woman and an African American trainer’s struggle to rehabilitate a vicious dog raised to attack black people. Coming into this film, I thought the PG rating would serve as a detriment itself and not allow the message to be told properly. I could not have been more wrong. Scenes where I would half expect a grisly image or two, are left out. Any other director, I would expect scenes of gore but not Samuel Fuller. It is his determined vision that is told without fear nor rest. It…

In his essay “The Body and the Archive,” Allan Sekula talks about photography’s potential for a “new juridical photographic realism” in the 1840s to, as Sekula puts it, “regulate the growing urban presence of the ‘dangerous classes,’ of a chronically unemployed sub-proletariat.” In short, physiognomy becomes one of the primary pseudosciences driving racist theories. Though Sekula’s essay wasn’t published until 1986, it’s easy to imagine Sam Fuller and Curtis Hanson thinking of these historical factors in crafting White Dog. After all, here it’s the young white woman who’s unemployed, but who nevertheless lives in a gorgeous house on the hills. It’s also her naiveté—her unfamiliarity with history—that allows her to embrace the wounded white German Shepherd with childlike glee. In…