White Dog (1982) is a drama movie directed by Samuel Fuller, featuring Paul Winfield, Kristy McNichol, Jameson Parker, and Burl Ives, that went unreleased for years because of its theme and subject: that racism is taught and learned, not innate. The film’s score was provided by Ennio Morricone.
Loosely based on a 1970 French novel by Romain Gary, the plot of the film centres on an unmarried woman (McNichol) who takes in a stray white German Shepherd dog for her protection. What she does not know is that a white racist trained it to attack Black people on sight. Faced with either having the dog killed or retrained, she takes it to a Black dog trainer (Winfield), who undertakes the dog’s re-education as a personal challenge. Some folk feared that White Dog would be a celebration of the racist attacks, and hence was very controversial.
As of 2007, the film has never been available on a legally licensed home video version in America. The Criterion Collection will release an edition of White Dog in 2008. http://www.criterion.com/eclipsenews/eclipse7/newsletter_eclipse-7.html?utm_source=Listrak&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=/eclipsenews/eclipse7/newsletter_eclipse-7.html&utm_content=alrodz@aol.com&utm_campaign=The%20Criterion%20Collection%20Newsletter%20-%20Ec|1 The release date is unknown.
The film is based on a true story. While she was living in Hollywood with her husband, writer Romain Gary, actress Jean Seberg brought home a large white dog she had found on the street that seemed friendly and playful. However, when the animal saw her black gardener it attacked him viciously, injuring him. Afterwards they kept it in the back yard, but one day it got out and attacked another black man on the street but no one else. After this happened a third time they realized that someone had trained the dog to attack and injure only black people. Gary wrote a story about it, and eventually Samuel Fuller read it and made it into this movie.
Never released theatrically in the United States, supposedly out of concern for its controversial subject matter. It did air on HBO several times.
