White Dog

1982 dog movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A woman takes in a dog after hitting it with her car, but even though they seem to have a mutual affection for each other, her new pet has a little problem with attacking black people. She takes it to an animal trainer in an effort to cure it.

"That's no attack dog! That's a white dog!"
"Of course it's a white dog."

Every time I see a Paul Bartel cameo in one of these 70s or 80s movies, especially one where he gets as little screen time as this, I'm fooled into thinking he was just a random guy who finangled his way onto movie sets. And I think that's why I love him.

I'll tell you who I really loved in this movie, and that's Burl Ives. He chews up more scenery than the titular dog chews up its victims. He mispronounces "Mercedes" (I think--who am I to judge?), he extols the virtues of sour cream, he talks about animals biting women on their "finer parts," and he throws syringes at a picture of R2D2 while claiming, "THAT is the enemy!" He also pulls off the rare quadruple-negative at one point ("Can't nobody unlearn a dog--nobody."). That, my friends, takes a special kind of talent.

Really, this movie belongs to the dog. There are actually five dogs credited here--Hans, Folsom, Son, Buster, and Duke--but I have no choice but to treat it as one performance. It's possible that the range of emotions this dog pulls off is just clever Samuel Fuller direction and editing and different dogs handling different emotions, but it's still an impressive feat. When that dog snarls, it almost feels like he's about to pop out of the screen and start chewing up my couch. It's a great dog performance!

I also liked the conditioning scenes with the dog and the "Key" character. The best part is when Key shows the dog his nipples. I'm going to try that if a racist dog ever attacks me.

My favorite scene is one with a black kid blowing up a balloon. Man, the tension packed into that little moment! Camera angle perfection and timing create a great moment there.

Is it my imagination or is there a lot of very dark humor here? I'm not sure the film would have worked for me without the humor. The Whitman's Sampler product placement, Burl Ives' shenanigans, and all these scenes where Kristy McNichol doesn't seem as concerned about the amount of blood this dog winds up covered in are all pretty funny.

At the same time, there's of course the social commentary about racism, something that isn't subtle at all. It's also not funny at all. If the dog represents what I think it represents, Ives' quadruple-negative "Can't nobody unlearn a dog--nobody" becomes a terrifying condemnation of human beings.

Ennio Morricone's score has some great moments.