School Daze

After the monster success of his low budget debut She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee had plenty of money to indulge his ambitions and the result is this whacky, way-too-long semi-musical comedy-cum-political tract about young blacks at an all-black Southern co-ed university.

Laurence Fishburne plays Dap, a politically-conscious brother who scorns the fraternity and sorority campus cliques and want to activate his fellow students for the black cause. His young cousin Half-Pint (Lee) will do anything to join the Gamma fraternity headed up by Julian (Giancarlo Esposito) while the light-skinned sisters of the Gamma Ray sorority battle it out with their darker-skinned fellow co-eds as Lee explores what it means to be black and middle class American. 

Based on Lee's experiences at Atlanta's Morehouse College, School Daze is, to say the least, idiosyncratic, and probably less appealing to today for its “black” credentials alone than it was in its time and certainly for anyone who isn’t familiar with the US university “Greek” system much of it will be slog. Still, it is worth catching, at least for Lee fans. His characterstically tongue-in-cheek humour shines through in the persona of Half-Pint and there are a couple of appealing musical numbers, including a cutting competition between the "wannabes" and "jigaboos" and the anthemic dance number, “Da Butt”. 

Many of the same team, both behind and in front of the camera, would return for Do The Right Thing which re-visited some of the themes of this film on a new, broader canvas and with much greater coherence and to much greater effect.

 

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