WHITE DOG

Director Samuel Fuller / 1981 / USA

From a story by Romain Gary White. Actress Julie Sawyer takes in a very attractive German Shepherd after having accidentally injured the dog with her car Julie grows very attached to the animal, and is rewarded when it repels a nocturnal prowler.

But when the dog violently attacks a black actress, with whom Julie is filming a commercial, Julie's boyfriend insists that it should be put down Instead, Julie takes it to a noted animal trainer and asks for help.

Keys, the trainer's black partner, realises that this is a "white dog", trained to attack blacks He undertakes to retrain it—against his partner's advice. Even after another serious incident, Keys obsessively continues his training and eventually his methods bear fruit-but they also provoke an unexpected side effect.

Romain Gary's story about the "white dog" originally appeared in Life Magazine It explored the ideology of racial relations as seen by the black power movement in the late 1960s, at the same time, it was a memoir of his marriage to Jean Seberg, whose liberated Hollywood conscience had sometimes been exploited by the black activists.

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