Trailer
Plot summary
At night on a road through the Los Angeles hills, the actress Julie Sawyer hits a stray white German Shepherd with her car. A veterinarian treats the dog, and Julie keeps him at her house while she and her boyfriend Roland Grale put up fliers to find his owner. A man breaks into the house and goes for her; the dog stops him, and Julie decides to adopt him. She then learns the animal had been taught by a racist to attack Black people. Attached to the dog, she searches for someone who can retrain him. Carruthers advises her to have the dog put down. Keys, a Black trainer of wild animals, takes on the job.
In these lists: The Best Horror Movies of the 1980s
Cast
- Glen Garneras Pound Worker (as Glen D. Garner)
- Terrence Beasoras Pound Driver
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about White Dog (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Paramount bought the novel in 1975 and hired Roman Polanski to direct, but before shooting could start Polanski was charged with rape and fled the country, leaving the project stalled for years until Samuel Fuller eventually took it on.
- In Romain Gary's original novel the story ran the other way: a black man embittered by racism deliberately retrains the dog to attack white people. Fuller reversed this into Keys, a black trainer trying to cure the dog, and rewrote the novel's ending to be more pessimistic.
- Before filming even began, the NAACP, the Black Anti-Defamation Coalition and other civil-rights leaders were already voicing concerns that the film would spur racial violence, based only on the premise rather than the finished picture.
- NBC paid $2.5 million for television broadcast rights and scheduled the film for the February sweeps, then canceled the airing just two days beforehand under continued pressure from an NAACP campaign against it.
- In 1991, Paramount repertory chief Michael Schlesinger booked the film into New York's Film Forum without telling his bosses it would run a full week rather than a single day, billing it as the film's New York premiere; it packed houses and The Village Voice later named it the best film of the year.
