Sam Fuller was frenetic. He was wiry and tough and ready to pounce on you with jittery enthusiasm. And in case you don’t know it, Martin Scorsese will tell you: If you don’t like the films of Sam Fuller, then you just don’t like cinema. Or at least you don’t understand it. Sam would hold a cigar in his teeth, then quickly swipe it out to start fast-talking, ready to thrust a lens on one of his protagonists’ faces at any moment, anxious to sweep himself and his viewers up in the pleasures of over-the-top B-movie intensities.
Based on Romain Gray’s autobiographical novel, Fuller’s controversial, late-period film White Dog begins with its attention on Julie Sawyer, a young actress who takes in a stray white German Shepherd she has accidentally hit while driving. After a few of the dog’s manic outbursts pile up, Sawyer and the audience realize that this is no ordinary dog but a perversely trained one: a white dog, taught to attack black people. Disturbed by the pathology of her otherwise gentle new companion, Sawyer seeks the help of a professional dog trainer. When he deems the dog’s state deadly serious, uncorrectable and cause for putting the dog down, in steps his partner, a black man named Keys, who insists, with an almost evangelical fervor, on undertaking a dangerous and likely futile attempt to retrain the dog.
White Dog is an allegory about racism perhaps too obvious and close to its subject to be properly called an allegory at all. Yet its social message never grates as overly simplistic precisely because Fuller and his viewers are too caught up in the piercing stares and violent emotions of Sawyer and Keys – not to mention the dog’s snarls, clenched teeth, and coat of fur so white you simply can’t look away – to possibly checklist analytic quibbles or missed sociological nuances. In characteristic Fuller style, White Dog is an unflinching, irony-less presentation of one heightened emotion after another. It reminds us of what it’s liked to be sucked into a film despite ourselves.
Who could put it better than Sam himself, in his cameo in Godard’s Pierrot le fou: “Film is like a battleground … love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotion!”
by Ben Ewing | Source: The Criterion Collection DVD
10 Mar 2010 7:48 AM | Comments (1)
