5. White Dog (1982)
White Dog is one of the most profound film studies on racism and race relations ever made. Director/co-writer Samuel Fuller touches upon these subjects in a thinly veiled parable about a white German Shepherd dog that has been trained by its white supremacist master to attack and kill any black person that it sees on sight. What he tries to say with this narrative device is that racism is obviously something that can be taught and can also be quite difficult if not impossible to reverse. In the film Paul Winfield plays a dog trainer who tries to take the dog under his wing and train it to accept all skin colors. Against the wishes of everyone around him the man finally feels the dog has been cured of his racism through his methods. At the film's climax the dog attacks a white man, and is put down before he can do damage to the man. The film left a controversial door open about what can be taught and what some of us have to unlearn, with the white dog being the metaphor for what grip racism has on our society.