Another trio of titles is set to grace the 4xblu online store’s virtual shelves. This latest batch includes Andrew Bujalski’s “Computer Chess,” Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to Matthew,” and Sam Fuller’s “White Dog.”
“White Dog” began as a short story that author Romain Gary wrote after he and his wife, actress Jean Seberg, brought home a German shepherd that they later learned had been trained to attack black people during its time as an Alabama police dog. Concerned that the film would inspire copycats, the NAACP protested its release, which led Paramount to shelve the picture domestically (it would screen in various overseas territories, but didn’t get a theatrical run in America until almost a decade later). Unlike the source material, in which a black trainer reprograms the dog so that it then attacks white people, the trainer in Fuller’s film attempts to rid the animal of its malice toward blacks and whites alike. Alas, after the butchering of his previous picture “The Big Red One” (which was hacked down to less than half of its original four hour runtime) and the shelving of “White Dog,” Fuller left the United States for France, where he continued to work.