James Belushi Saves the Ghetto in the Ridiculous 1987 White Savior Drama The Principal

They used to call him "Crazy" Rick Lattimer. Now they call him bat-man!

American movies have historically dealt with race and racism by ignoring them. The 1987 James Belushi vehicle The Principal is a good example. It’s an exploitation movie about a white fuck-up schoolteacher who is put in charge of a crime-ravaged, overwhelmingly African-American school as punishment for a felony punishable by DECADES in prison and proceeds to clean it up through a combination of toughness and compassion. 

It’s an unusually pure white savior narrative in which a crappy, subpar white man moves into a black space and is put in charge of black people and rises to the occasion by morphing instantly into the inspirational educator every troubled school needs. 

Race is at the center of everything yet it almost never comes up. It is never discussed. Oh sure, the cartoonish street thugs here call the titular bat-wielding hero White Boy. That’s because cartoonish street thugs in 1980s movies ALWAYS called caucasian males White Boy. The most prominent white villain is nicknamed “White Zac” but that is as far as the film is willing to go in terms of acknowledging that race and racism both exist and may, in fact, figure prominently in a movie about a white man saving a black school. 

Before The Principal establishes protagonist Principal Rick Latimer as the kind of heroic white man every black school needs it first depicts him as a real creep. 

Rick is lazily coasting his way through a job he doesn’t care about. He looks at a student’s shapely legs through a pair of binoculars and tells another comely nymphet to start wearing a bra to school. 

In the 1980s this kind of wildly inappropriate randiness let audiences know that their main character was a fun guy who didn’t exactly play by the rules and had an eye for the ladies. Today, however, that kind of behavior would be seen as clear-cut sexual harassment.

Beat it, beat it!

It somehow gets worse. At a bar later that night Rick sees his ex-wife saunter in with her lawyer. In a fit of rage Rick takes a baseball bat to the man’s fancy sports car and proceeds to destroy it in an orgy of destruction that calls to mind the infamous original long cut of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video before all of the VERY necessary dick-grabbing and car destruction got edited out. 

Instead of going to jail for assault Rick is instead transferred to Brandel High, an inner city high school out of every MAGA racist’s paranoid imagination. 

That’s right: Rick commits a felony and receives an ostensible promotion to principal as a reward. The Principal is consequently part of a weird sub-genre where white people commit crimes and have to look after at-risk children as punishment. 

I was an at-risk kid. I grew up in a group home. I can personally vouch that that shit did not happen. 

Nobody introduced a shaggy middle-aged man to us by saying, “So this is Bob. He was arrested for Drunk Driving and exposing himself. Anyway this weird adult stranger who is also a criminal will be coaching your softball team and running the group home on the weekends.” 

Brandel is a school of last resort for juvenile delinquents who have been forcibly ejected from less hopeless and doomed educational institutions. It’s filled with criminals, drug dealers, drug users and people who enjoy playing their boomboxes on full blast during school hours, which is straight up disrespectful. 

The school is ruled with an iron fist by Victor Duncan (Michael Wright), a soft-spoken gang leader and drug dealer who does not take kindly to the new principal’s plan to eliminate crime and promote learning and education. 

Victor imposes something roughly approximating law and order to a previously lawless realm with the help of Jake Phillips (Louis Gossett Jr.), the school’s head security guard and a cynic who had more or less given up before a drunk, violent white man showed up and taught everyone to believe in themselves and pursue their dreams.  

In the mid to late 1980s we as a nation became obsessed with the idea of a man with anger issues using a baseball bat to terrorize an inner city school into excellence. 

Rick uses a baseball bat as an unusual, unlikely but effective educational aid here. Two years later Morgan Freeman delivered an even more iconic performance as bat-wielding principal “Crazy” Joe “Bat-man” Clark in Lean On Me.

The principal deputizes particularly intimidating-looking teachers as security guards and through intimidation Brandel becomes less crime-friendly.

The backlash is fierce, however. The racist stereotypes who rule the school and deal drugs physically assault the principal and destroy his beloved motorcycle. 

Belushi spends a lot of time on his motorcycle here. That serves multiple purposes. First and foremost, it establishes that Rick is cool in a manner not unlike the Fonz, who also had a motorcycle. The motorcycle also allows our hero to traverse the hallways far quicker than he could on foot. Having Belushi spend a lot of time on a motorcycle while masked finally allows the filmmakers to flagrantly use stunt men during all of these sequences, since it’s impossible to see who is actually riding. 

Rick’s motorcycle also comes in handy when he must keep one of his teachers from being sexually assaulted. 

In perhaps the film’s sole nod to racial sensitivity the masked rapist turns out to be none other than the nefarious “White Zac” and the woman he’s trying to sexually assaulting is a biracial woman played by Rae Dawn Chong. 

I was worried that Chong, who plays a weary teacher who views the school’s blustery new leader with wariness and suspicion, would be pressed into service as Rick’s love interest but The Principal wisely eschews a romantic subplot. 

Besides, Rick is way too busy saving a black school in a black neighborhood from the black criminals who have transformed it into a war zone to have time for loving. 

With the exception of Chong, every teacher in this 95 percent black school is white and deeply unenthusiastic about their jobs, their lives and their students yet that is never mentioned or commented upon. 

Ah, but the title educator isn’t just a baseball bat-wielding, motorcycle-riding badass. He’s also a teacher who genuinely cares about his students. When he’s not cleaning up the school he’s teaching a young boy to read or encouraging another’s talents as a writer. 

The white savior narrative is shamelessly recycled here without an ounce of self-awareness or shame. The filmmakers apparently felt that making some of the villains white and some of the heroes black would absolve the film of any and all charges of racism. 

The Principal is casually fascist in its deification of strength and order. It’s a deeply reactionary fantasy about a righteous white person entering an urban hellhole and making it civilized.

Considering Belushi’s roots as a sketch performer and the younger brother of perhaps comedy’s preeminent martyr it’s a little strange how many action movies I’ve already written up for this feature and how many still lurk in our future. 

I suspect that Belushi ended up doing a lot of action movies and action comedies not because he had any real enthusiasm for them but rather because those are the kinds of movies that get made by American studios. So if you want to be in movies that get theatrically released those are by definition the kinds of parts you play. 

The Principal is a bit of an outlier in that it is an action movie about a principal rather than the requisite cops but it’s also a job where Belushi’s action hero does the police’s work for them because they’re scared to step foot in his neighborhood. 

Belushi ably handles the film’s action, comedy and dramatic elements. Having just written up Wired, the notorious John Belushi biopic, for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book on movies about the film industry, I was struck anew by how much James Belushi looks and sounds like his brother.

Would John Belushi have ended up in movies like The Principal had he lived? Probably. Making action movies sometimes feels like the cost of being a working actor these days. 

There are worse fates. The Principal hit me right in the nostalgic sweet spot. The very elements that make the movie deeply problematic, particularly its unexamined, unacknowledged racism, are also what make it interesting, or at least much richer and more compelling than the usual action fare. 

Incidentally Belushi later reprised the role of Principal Rick Lattimer in the 1991 science fiction cult movie Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe. This is my newsletter and I can do whatever the hell I want with it so two weeks from now I am going to post a piece on Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe because that is what I want to do.

You’re welcome. 

Up next: Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe