With his controversial late masterpiece White Dog, Fuller offers a brutally direct yet disturbingly nuanced allegory of American racism, a recurrent topic of previous films but returning now with a dark and furious vengeance. Fuller adapted a 1970 "non-fiction novel" by Romain Gary—purchased years earlier by the now-deposed Paramount chief executive Robert Evans—into an intensely efficient and hard-hitting message film punctuated by extreme close-ups and explosions of raw violence. Categorically refusing any kind of complacent viewing, White Dog reveals racism to be both a darkly aberrant and frighteningly normalized reality of American life, an uncomfortable truth embodied in the titular canine, a white German shepherd carefully trained to brutally attack black skin. Fuller's typically overripe dialogue is evident but sparer here, as are his symbolically charged characters, led by Kristy McNichol in her first film role as the struggling actress—and symbol of uncertain Hollywood—who first encounters the wounded stray dog and an avuncular, oracular Burl Ives as a veteran animal trainer and talismanic figure of the now-defunct studio system. Yet strongest still is Paul Winfield as the African American trainer obsessed with defusing and reconditioning the white dog's hatred. Unfairly condemned as a racist film by an NAACP advisor, White Dog was deemed too incendiary and shelved by Paramount for almost a decade, a cowardly and ridiculous move that drove Fuller into self-imposed exile in Paris, effectively ending his Hollywood career.