Remembering the Movies, Jan. 28 - Feb. 3

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

Visit Remembering the Movies to further peruse the past

It's a colorful week: eighteenth-century French martial artists, shrinking women, and a liver-munching serial killer rub shoulders as we transition into the second month of the year. Actors include Fatty Arbuckle, Marilyn Monroe, and the very first film star, while a strong directorial field ranges from Hitchock to Huston to Sam Fuller. On another note, opinions are like assholes, and this week I happen to have one (an opinion, that is). So by popular request I offer my (brief) thoughts on the film highlighted above, alongside a memorable "Siskel & Ebert" exchange on the same movie. Break out the fava beans...

White Dog

The story of an attack dog re-trained by a black man, White Dog combines the sincerity of the animal picture, the heart of the "message" movie, and the rudimentary dynamism of the exploitation film into one powerful little package. Perhaps it was that last element, here understood as a genre niche rather than a marketing device, which unnerved the NAACP. In 1981 the organization cast doubt upon the film's potential influence (they seemed to believe it would result in an upsurge of the very phenomenon it seeks to discourage) and got Paramount Pictures to shelve the film, breaking writer/director Sam Fuller's heart. Indeed, a scene in which a truck crashes into a storefront does lean a bit too heavily on action-movie tropes, and a grisly killing (offscreen, but no less upsetting for it) makes the viewer temporarily question its necessity. But by the end of the film it's clear that Fuller is dead serious; however entertaining and inventive the finished product, White Dog is fundamentally earnest in its desire to investigate racism (in a mode more visceral than didactic). Perhaps the film's undoing was actually due to that very earnestness, an inability to treat race is a mere excuse for action sequences and iconic posturing.