Samuel Fuller

White Dog

White Dog

Samuel Fuller’s throat-grabbing exposé on American racism was misunderstood and withheld from release when it was made in the early eighties; today, the notorious film is lauded for its daring metaphor and gripping pulp filmmaking. Kristy McNichol stars as a young actress who adopts a lost German shepherd, only to discover through a series of horrifying incidents that the dog has been trained to attack black people, and Paul Winfield plays the animal trainer who tries to cure him. A snarling, uncompromising vision, White Dog is a tragic portrait of the evil done by that most corruptible of animals: the human being.

Film Info

  • United States
  • 1982
  • 90 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.78:1
  • English
  • Spine #455

Special Features

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer of the uncut version, approved by producer Jon Davison
  • New video interviews with producer Davison, co-writer Curtis Hanson, and Sam Fuller’s widow, Christa Lang-Fuller
  • An interview with dog trainer Karl Lewis-Miller
  • Rare photos from the film’s production
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: New essays by critics J. Hoberman and Armond White, plus a rare 1982 interview in which Fuller interviews the canine star of the film

    New cover by Eric Skillman

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer of the uncut version, approved by producer Jon Davison
  • New video interviews with producer Davison, co-writer Curtis Hanson, and Sam Fuller’s widow, Christa Lang-Fuller
  • An interview with dog trainer Karl Lewis-Miller
  • Rare photos from the film’s production
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: New essays by critics J. Hoberman and Armond White, plus a rare 1982 interview in which Fuller interviews the canine star of the film

    New cover by Eric Skillman
White Dog
Cast
Kristy McNichol
Julie Sawyer
Paul Winfield
Keys
Burl Ives
Carruthers
Jameson Parker
Roland Gray
Lynne Moody
Molly
Marshall Thompson
Director
Christa Lang
Nurse
Samuel Fuller
Charlie Felton
Hans
Dogs
Folsom
Son
Buster
Duke
Credits
Director
Samuel Fuller
Producer
Jon Davison
Screenplay
Samuel Fuller
Screenplay
Curtis Hanson
Based upon the story by
Romain Gary
Executive producers
Edgar J. Scherick
Executive producers
Nick Vanoff
Cinematography
Bruce Surtees
Production design
Brian Eatwell
Editing
Bernard Gribble
Music
Ennio Morricone
Dogs trained by
Animal Action: Karl Lewis Miller

Current

The White Dog Speaks—to Sam Fuller
The White Dog Speaks—to Sam Fuller
Samuel Fuller wrote this extraordinary “interview” piece shortly after White Dog was completed. It appeared in issue 19 of the journal Framework in 1982, with this introduction: “The director of Paramount’s White Dog interviewed the title act…
Juice, with Lots of Pulp: Samuel Fuller’s Brainquake
Juice, with Lots of Pulp: Samuel Fuller’s Brainquake

A review of the American auteur’s posthumously published novel

By Michael Atkinson

Georgia Hubley’s Top 10
Georgia Hubley’s Top 10

Georgia Hubley is one of the founding members of the Hoboken, New Jersey, band Yo La Tengo, whose The Sounds of Science, a score to eight Jean Painlevé shorts, is available on Criterion’s DVD set Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé.

Singing Morricone’s Praises
Singing Morricone’s Praises
The eighty-one-year-old Ennio Morricone has been composing hypnotic music for film since the early 1960s, for projects ranging from spaghetti westerns (his whistling, woodwindy five-note theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most rec…

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Samuel Fuller

Writer, Director

Samuel Fuller
Samuel Fuller

Crime reporter, freelance journalist, pulp novelist, screenwriter, World War II infantryman—Samuel Fuller was a jack of all trades before the high-school dropout directed his first film at age thirty-six. But once he was contacted by Poverty Row producer Robert L. Lippert, a fan of his writing, Fuller was turned on to cinema—his true calling. A singularly audacious visionary of the B-movie variety, Fuller would make muscular, minuscule pictures, starting with the one-two-three punch of I Shot Jesse James, The Baron of Arizona, and The Steel Helmet—the last a raw Korean War saga that was one of the few films of the period to address racism in America. Soon after, Fuller was scooped up by Twentieth Century Fox, but he was able to maintain his purposefully crude, elegantly stripped-down style and teeth-bared cynicism for such studio efforts as Fixed Bayonets! and Pickup on South Street. Eventually, Fuller returned to independent filmmaking, and in the sixties (after his artistic cred had been given a shot in the arm by the French New Wavers’ embrace of him as a major stylistic influence), he directed two of his most acclaimed titles, the pulpy and profound Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, both corrosive satires of American culture. Even in his career’s twilight, Fuller didn’t shy away from controversy: his early eighties social horror film White Dog was shelved by the studio for more than a decade due to its provocative, bloody investigation of American racism.