Via_Chicago wrote:HerrSchreck wrote:Do yourself a big favor and get into Fuller in his prime and at his best-- South Street, Shock C. & The Naked Kiss. Much better than White Dog imho. I'd probably even go with the Eclipse tites over it.
I disagree in that I find
White Dog to be the perfect distillation of Fuller's particular brand of cinema. Perhaps that's because of the film's relatively modern setting, but many of the quintessential Fuller trademarks are present: "explosive" subject (Fuller even directly alludes to this in his chapter on
White Dog in his autobiography titled "Four-legged Timebomb"), dime store novel dialogue, blunt earnestness (the only Fuller that really manages to avoid this earnestness is
Underworld USA, which is easily the most cynical movie that the man ever made), borderline hysterical ending, etc. These aspects of the film, so quintessentially Fuller, are largely what put audiences off (or cause snickering and accusations of "camp"). And yet, aren't these the things that make Fuller one of the few directors to truly understand the possibilities of the medium? Its possibilities as a tool of raw, unadulterated power? (for more on this, see
Verboten! - there's a scene in which one of the young neo-Nazis is stunned into submission when confronted with the atrocities of the ideology he ostensibly supports).
White Dog isn't simply a guilty pleasure or a campy exercise in pulp fun, but a shocking and sobering reminder of the pervasiveness of racism as a social disease - one that can only be eliminated by way of complete destruction. It is at the very least a much darker and more mature film than it's been given credit for.
As for more Fuller, from what's available in R1, I'd recommend these the most:
-
The Steel Helmet
- Fixed Bayonets!
- Pickup on South Street
- I Shot Jesse James
- Forty Guns
- Shock Corridor
- The Naked Kiss
I wanted to wait until I saw all of this film, all the way through, before taking up a response to your reply.
I understand your reasoning viz your assertion that the film is spangled with elements which make it "quintessentially" Fuller-- I might go so far as to
somewhat agree with that assessment... but the fact that the film bears
some of these hallmarks (and only cursorily so... I do NOT,as some people do, count bad filmmaking, or campy script/delivery, as "Fulleresque") does not make it a
good Fuller film. There are some in your face moments with the dog, and the Ives character, and the feeling of the whole film being on the razor's edge (but sadly, a rare instance of, in this metaphor, it bleeding badly from the razor instead of tightroping thru it's runtime to success), and a certain tone to the dialog.. this is true.
One of the things I love most about Fuller is his need for Big Doses. I read him as a man who has passed certain barriers of experience, of witnessed-event, surpassed the average human existential threshholds whereby Callouses of Perception build up... like hands engaged in high volumes of excess work... a cognitive resistance, a
tolerance to existential stimulation... whereby the man as a rule Needed More. He needed more to get his thing on, to get off on life-- he liked big characters, unusual event, color color color! The scratched heads he got from some viewers in the audiecce he no doubt got in his social life. And this Bigness, this color! color! color! is what he spit back out into his movies.
You say that Fuller can be explosive as dynamite-- that's true. Not here though. For me the film suffers from what is-- for almost anyone, I'd imagine-- long stretches of Cinematic Sin Numero Uno: it's boring. And boredom is something that Fuller rarely inflicted upon an audence, because his films were genuine extensions of his audacious personality. He populated his films with guys kind of like him, like guys he'd known or heard of who crack him up or had an affection for. But here in this film, the action & content doesn't seem to spring from his social personality... it springs from his belief in justice, of What's Right, his anger and sense of social responsibility-it sprung en toto from his moral sense. The huge Fuller characters, the lovingly detailed exposition of their eccentrities, and their wild situations, is gone. Fuller is at his best getting his kicks out of giving you your kicks via him Being Wild. It's tempting to equate Fuller at his best with Constance Towers without the wig in the opening of
N.Kiss-- a fringe character who works in the fringes of humanity beating you around the room... but I think the most appropriate symbol of his cinematic world is Widmark's shack in
Pickup: it's on the fringes, seems simplistic from the outside, is inexpensively made yet contains ingenious inventions and holds hidden contents of great value, is the happy home of a clever operator who isn't at home with-- or neccessarily welcomed by-- the middle class.
The subject matter in
White Dog is outside of that home, and treated too deicately and reverentially for those Fuller freaky trademarks-- here clumsily in brief evidence in Ives' character who seems utterly ridiculous save for a few quirky moments-- to truly let fly, and therefore in this sense the film is tame. Compare his treatment of racial injustice in this film to
Shock Corridor, or even
Steel Helmet-- there his personality is fully engaged with the characters and the narrative. There's a solemnity in
White Dog that pops up here & there, almost a preciousness, that is just not Fuller's territory.
One thing Sam had was a tuned-in sense of humor... I strongly believe he knew for the most part when he was cracking people up (and by people I mean people like us who are ready for his films and style for his post-50',s more eccentric films, and
everyone back in the Fox days for example); this film is a rare occasion where he fell off the tightrope, and earned chuckles in unwanted places... tragic in a Fuller fim, especially one he clearly made with such earnestness.
It's fun watching McNichol (the Katie Couric of the late-70's/early 80's, I now see) walk around braless, but that's no substitute for the fact that as a character, she is drawn as a nonentity who--in his terms at least-- he puts little effort into rendering. Fuller here seems most concerned with creating intermittent moments of profundity, scenes with metaphors he probably believed would hit like perfect, poignant, hot knives in the American gut-- this is not what Fuller is good at, and never was. Fuller always takes you to whatever social comment he may or may not wish to make via the thruway of his characters and narrative event-unfolding; this deployment of blatant metaphor and symbolism was imho excessively clumsy. My heart throbs for the sincerty of his intent in, say, his metaphor for the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing viz the church killing-- because I see him putting the scene together and imaginng in his mind's eye an audience perfectly devastated (and god knows I welcome the protest of every devastated viewer)-- but this material feels like it's patently in the wrong director's hands. This kind of deadly serious social commentary, with no eclecticism whatsoever (beyond the accidental strangeness wrought by its klunkiness), is, for better or for worse, not his territory and it's all out of joint.
Lastly-- more obviously for most critics I'm sure-- and I wont dwell on it because it's such a soft taget in this film-- the film is filled with narrative holes & other problems of script clumsiness. As a veteran journalist, one thing that Fuller
always had an iron grip on was Story. Not even counting the fact that there is virtually no story here, there are many plot holes and weaknesses in the narrative... many times I kept wondering "But how..?", or "When did they...", "But what about...?"
And really, this must be Morricone's worst score. That triplet figure on the piano was driving me batty by the end of the film.
If this were directed by a less celebrated director, it'd be completely forgotten as sub made-for-tv material. And I say this as a man who absolutely adores Fuller-- a true, all-American great, and absolutely and utterly a most distinct One-of-a-Kind.
