Beware of the Dog-2

Sometime in the late '80s, I happened to notice a local independent station in Chicago was showing Sam Fuller's White Dog on a weekday afternoon. I had read about its troubled history by that time, so I made a special effort to catch it.

I don't know if it was the timeslot, but I felt as disappointed as if I had watched an Afterschool Special. Maybe it was the generic Southern California locations, or just the "social issue to be cured" angle. It might've been due to my total unfamiliarity with Fuller's work up to that point. And still, there was something just haunting enough about the film that I had to see it again.

That meant searching it out through "tape traders"-those quasi-legal people who manage to get hold of "lost" films. I ordered a copy through one of these businesses; when I received it, the case was all in Dutch, and the film itself had Dutch subtitles (at least now I know "good dog" in Dutch is "brave hond," a phrase repeated many times in the film). Fuller's film had been well-received in Europe, so it even made it to tape, while it remained unknown in the US.

This remains the only way to see the film, through bootlegged European tapes. To this day, White Dog remains lost to the wide world of American cable television.