A cigar-chomping newspaperman turned two-fisted pulp auteur, Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) never had much use for subtlety. His signature style -- lurid, didactic, in-your-face -- would seem to leave little room for ambiguity. But because Fuller's films were often more complex than his tabloid sensibility suggested, he spent a good deal of his career being misunderstood and battling controversy.
His breakthrough film, 1951's Korean War drama "The Steel Helmet," was labeled pro-Communist for depicting racism within the ranks of the U.S. Army. Although considered red-baiting propaganda by some, his Cold War-era noir "Pickup on South Street" (1953) was famously singled out for condemnation by J. Edgar Hoover, who deemed the Richard Widmark character insufficiently patriotic. But no Fuller film whipped up a bigger storm than "White Dog" (1982), his stark moral fable about a racist German shepherd.
With the threat of a boycott looming after the NAACP took issue with the premise, the film's studio, Paramount, deemed it unfit for both theatrical and home-video release. It was Fuller's last Hollywood movie and has been largely unseen outside of a brief belated run in 1991 and occasional late-night TV airings. It finally makes its DVD debut this week, courtesy of the Criterion Collection.
"White Dog" came with an intriguing pedigree. It was based on the 1970 book by Romain Gary, a semiautobiographical novel in which the French author and his wife, actress Jean Seberg, encounter a stray dog that has apparently been programmed to attack black people on sight. Gary's book evolves into a wide-ranging meditation on race relations in this country, drawing on the queasy mood of late-'60s, newly post-civil-rights America and explicitly discussing Seberg's involvement with the Black Panthers.
The idea for a movie adaptation had floated around Hollywood for some time; Roman Polanski and Arthur Penn were among the directors previously attached.
When the project landed with Fuller, who had worked infrequently since the mid- 1960s and whose previous film, 1980's "The Big Red One," was butchered by the studio, he revised the script with his friend Curtis Hanson, who had worked on an earlier version.
