White Dog (1982)

(In French, On TV, July 2021) I love discovering older movies that, for a reason or another, still feel fresh — either because what they did hasn’t been attempted again, or because their themes are, in some way, curiously relevant today. White Dog scores high on both counts, and a look at the film’s immensely troubled release only adds fuel to its interest. Its unsettling premise can be summarized in a few words, as the film’s heroine discovers a dog that, she later discovers, has been trained to kill black people. As a way to literalize a metaphor, it’s on-the-nose — but it’s a great way to examine a troubling question under different constraints. It still feels daring and uncomfortable now, so it’s no surprise to discover that the film was practically buried by the studio upon completion studio back in 1982 — afraid of racial controversy, American distributors barely showed the film while it did some business in Europe (hence, I suppose, the French dub I watched). White Dog is now widely available, but you can see why the amount of handwringing — it’s easy to imagine a remake getting the same amount of controversy. This being said, I can admire the film’s premise without quite agreeing with its execution: hewing far too close to horror rather than drama, director Samuel Fuller gets to have a socially provocative premise and gory death sequences: For reasons not credibly explained in the film, the killer dog is allowed to live well after a few deaths, placing the moral responsibility of the later deaths squarely on the obstinate humans supposed to be the heroes of the film. White Dog gets increasingly outlandish as it goes on (most notably after the protagonist’s black co-worker gets mauled by the dog and the film shrugs on its way to another death) and seemingly does its best in sabotaging its meager social commentary by cheap genre-horror tricks. Given this, I would not be surprised to learn about a remake any time soon — in fact, I’m surprised it hasn’t already been announced, most likely featuring a K-9 unit to further drive the point home. In the meantime, the original White Dog remains a flawed dare — provocative enough to wow viewers forty years later, but not quite successful enough to satisfy the expectations that it raises.