Cinema
Dog days
Peter Ackroyd
White Dog ('15', selected cinemas),
!t Most 'animal films' are better without the intrusion of human interest: the animal kingdom is characteristically used to sYmbolise human feelings in so simplistic a manner that actual people would prove an unwelcome distraction. Sam Fuller's most t-Cent film attempts to bring both worlds °gether, but with uneven results. The eponymous dog is a German shepherd who has been trained to attack black people; b 'ling been rescued from a road accident Y an actress (played by Kristy McNichol), seems to be the perfect pet until it arrives home with slavering and bloody jaws: this is t0 those the way, a film to be recommended
,,,.- 'ilose who have the slightest reason to iTsPect dogs of harbouring a grudge against
ti"eni. The sight of the hound bearing down up,‘Paobriarhais tinted victims would alarm even Woodhouse, let alone Sidney h°itier. Once the fact of the dog's ferocity haws, been established, however, the final bi:, Of the plot concerns the efforts of a ek dog-handler to retrain the white is best friend and extirpate its racism. It horror a pleasant story, 'and the mood of „rtor which it manages to evoke is coin- rvuktMded by the claustrophobic atmosphere that Mr Fuller has created — a sense of wlihat awful something just about to happen e eh is borrowed from the conventional rher3rert°ire of the 'horror film', but which is PUlel rather more skilfully achieved. Sam how or Perhaps his editor, knows exactly int_ ° iePace at
the action so that diminished'retie to scene,
thish.s e nature of the plot might suggest that that' a belated exercise in anti-racism but terestinesing Satz inw tooage is no obvious to e in-
at least the cinema — the scene
in which a sweet old gentleman cuddling two grand-daughters is shown to be the dog's original owner suggests, in any case, that Mr Fuller is no longer interested in the familiar stereotypes. White Dog is, rather, a meditation upon the nature of aggression itself, partly as it is reflected in the relation- ship between the human and animal king- doms (Tartan with a brain rather than simply a loincloth) but, more importantly, as it is established in most kinds of human relationship and activity. All of the pro- tagonists exhibit it in one way or another the dog is re-trained in 'Noah's Ark', the euphemistic name for a zoo from which the animals are loaned to film studios, and most of the characters are part of the Californian 'film world', the members of which are shown to be motivated by exactly the same kinds of fear and greed which afflict the dog itself. (This film might be seen as Sam Fuller's tribute to the industry in which he has worked for so many years.) There are more ostensible forms of violence, too: a rape in the first three minutes, war films on the television screen, and a lingering close-up of the gas chamber where stray dogs are 'put to sleep'. It is, in fact, a bleak and somewhat unpleasant vision which is sustained in so deliberate a manner that every camera angle is used to enhance it. Sam Fuller's especial talent seems to lie in a form of grotesquerie, and in the creation of slightly unreal but nevertheless unnerving scenarios — many of which contain the alarming figure of Burl Ives, whose corn-cob voice always sounds positively malicious. The camera gets very close to the actors so that parts of their bodies loom out from the screen; unflattering light is employed, so that even the pleasant if passive face of Kristy McNichol is flattened and distorted; sometimes the action is shot from dog's- eye-level, so that the world itself seems shadowy and foreshortened. If Rin Tin Tin had been directed by Diane Arbus, a similar effect might have been achieved. Some of the most powerful scenes are more conventional, however, since they are shot in the dog-handler's cage, where his aphorism 'NobodY can unlearn a dog' is put to the test. The action here is reminis- cent of the most grandiloquent pages of Women in Love, as the whiteness of the dog is pitted against the blackness of his negroid antagonist. Again, as an oustretch- ed arm is used to bait the dog, it is not easy to look at: Sam Fuller milks as much excite- ment out of the anticipation of bloodshed, and the spectacle of revenge, as is either necessary or desirable.
It is a hard tone to control, however, and he is only able to sustain it for about an hour. Then the narrative begins to slip away from him in a welter of excess. In a film such as this, which depends entirely upon the audience's involvement with the action, one touch of implausibility and the whole enterprise falls apart; so it is that, when the dog-handler decides to continue training the dog even after it has escaped from the compound and killed a man, the tension which the film laboured hard to create is at once dissipated. The situation is incon- ceivable and, in the cinema I attended, pro- voked only laughter. When Mr Fuller's hold upon the story is weakened in this manner, all the easy symbolism and crude melodrama which he had previously managed to keep at bay comes flooding in through the gap — a symbolism the crudity of which is summarised in the sentence `Noah's Ark is like a laboratory that Dar- win himself would go ape over.' And when we learn that the black dog-handler's parents are anthropologists, it is time to leave the cinema. This is rather a pity, since White Dog had at least the potential of becoming a very good film. But I suppose it is rather lowering, in any case, to have human problems analysed in terms of dogs.
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