Blue Collar (1978) – DVD

***/**** Image B- Sound C+ Commentary B+
starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Cliff DeYoung
screenplay by Paul Schrader & Leonard Schrader
directed by Paul Schrader

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Blue Collar gave me pause. On the one hand, it’s a no-excuses lambasting of management control and union corruption, railing against those who conspire to keep labour powerless and pliable. On the other, it offers no avenue for redress, throwing its protagonists’ lives out the window in an attempt to be modishly downbeat. The film is constantly at odds with itself, riling us into an angry mob while limiting the outlets for that anger, assuming that no political solution is possible and thus chopping everyone off at the knees. The result is a compulsively watchable film that never figures out what it’s trying to say, contained as it is within a boundary that keeps it from investigating the true nature of the problem.

Zeke (Richard Pryor), Jerry (Harvey Keitel) and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto) are friends who work at an auto plant. They live under conditions that they share with most of the other workers: a foreman who is unforgiving of any sort of infraction on company time, a union leader who is corrupt and ineffectual, and a management that is utterly oblivious to the needs of its employees. Worse, some of them are having money troubles. Zeke has to pay a nasty tax bill after listing more dependents than he actually had, and Jerry is trying to come up with money to buy braces for his unhappy daughter. All three men are feeling the pinch of having only so much money, and even less power, to transform their lives from the constant struggle of just keeping their heads above water.

Then Zeke stumbles upon an opportunity. While at the union office to complain about the broken locker management won’t fix, he happens on a safe which is largely unprotected and ripe for the taking. Rallying Jerry and Smokey to the cause, Zeke hatches a plot with them to knock over the safe and whatever cash they find inside. Overpowering a guard and seizing the strongbox, the three men are disappointed to find only $600. But they also discover a notebook within filled with information that could incriminate the extremely corrupt union. But while they secretly plan to extort money with this information, the union has other ideas. Sizing up the three of them, they use cajoling, conniving, and outright violence in their attempt to silence the men who could bring them down.

On the plus side, the film pulls no punches when it comes to evoking the trials of the workers. The Brothers Schrader (Paul and Leonard) have cleverly combined both the miserable working conditions at the plant with the miserable domestic situations the workers face at home. Life at the plant is a series of humiliations as the foreman attacks everything that even vaguely looks like human behaviour in an insane drive for higher productivity. For their efforts, the workers are rewarded with malfunctioning coffee machines, broken lockers, and a barely-suppressed sneer of contempt from the falsely jovial management. This doesn’t change much when they find their ways back home. There is always some little thing that needs doing that the household budget can’t account for, and there is of course the looming menace of the mortgage and the unpaid-for furnishings. Life is nothing but a struggle for these men, and the film makes it clear that something must be done to turn the tables.

But the question remains: what tables, and how to turn them? While Blue Collar is excellent at assessing the damage wreaked by the system, it also makes a huge mistake by rendering the system itself invisible. We don’t see how the union was made corrupt, and we sure don’t see anyone attempting to change it. In the film’s jaundiced view of union practices, there is only co-optation and politics, blowing off completely the idea of any resistance to the corporate order. The vast system of international unions and their leaders, as well as the wars they wage to maintain a front that can stand up to the front office, are here reduced to a few smiley-faced liars, who, it is strongly asserted, are impossible to depose.

Predictably, the same can be said for the bosses, here represented by one fatherly figure who only pretends to listen to grievances. If the union is vaguely represented, then the company itself is all but obscured. In fact, they’re downright benevolent compared to the union, who engineer the undoing of the tiny conspiracy that might ruffle some feathers, or at least make them a little money. This elision of huge organizations into a few villains points towards a dramatic style that is a political failure, shutting all exits and imprisoning us with its hapless protagonists. The film’s style is similarly trapped between personal truth and political invisibility. Paul Schrader’s shooting method finds itself wedging the protagonists in the middle of the screen, trapping them between walls, furnishings, or simply between each other. A morning-after tableau finds our heroes crammed together on a couch after a ribald party, backlit by an open window as they talk about their misery and overextended finances. The scene has power because it shows the actors in a claustrophobic setting; one feels the crushing forces surrounding their lives and sympathizes with them.

Lack of motion is a motif in this film, and the camera goes out of its way to trap the men in space and thus mirror their inner state. But like everything else in Blue Collar, the style doesn’t go beyond that into analysis, evoking a feeling instead of facilitating an analysis. As with the narrative, one wishes to see some sign of hope or resistance contrasted with these images, or have them related to other images of the system at work and the efforts to stop them. One finds the film is gripping as far as it goes, but one also wants more; in lieu of a rallying cry, we are saddled with a funereal dirge, a fashionable cynicism instead of a pointed indignation.

This is not to say that Blue Collar is without merit. Indeed, it’s so good at evoking the static desperation of the working class that one can forgive its larger failure to provide a political vision. The film has been made timely again with labour’s advancing attack on globalization, and I can’t think of another movie that suggests what is being fought for. Still, it must be said that it could have used a more affirmative outlook; the protests today are a sign that unions can have good intentions and might have some impact, and it is this truth that Blue Collar misplaces on the way to its sullen defeat.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers The great Blue Collar will probably never look or sound better outside of a cinema than it does on DVD from Anchor Bay (licensing from Universal), and that’s a shame. Letterboxed at 1.85:1, the 16×9-enhanced image is far from a disaster, although it does appear to be an anamorphicized version of a vintage transfer. Some scenes are unnaturally soft-looking, and colours smear from time to time. Edge enhancement has been employed. On the plus side, the print used for the mastering is very clean, and compression artifacts are at a minimum. The 2.0 mono soundtrack distorts at loud levels, and only Jack Nitzsche’s bluesy score has any real character. Disappointingly, there are no closed-captions or subtitles; Anchor Bay has been slow to adopt them.

Paul Schrader contributes a feature-length yak-track (nudged into discussion by journalist Maitland McDonagh) that fascinates but ultimately leaves one unfulfilled. While I enjoyed learning of on-set pissing contests (those long takes weren’t always an artistic choice: often, the actors refused to do more than a master shot because they couldn’t stand to be around each other) and such details as Schrader’s reason for filming in a checkered cab plant (which is not, as I had presumed, in homage to Taxi Driver), I would also like to have heard Schrader dissect the film’s social commentary. There are long stretches of silence where he could have easily done so. Other extras: the theatrical trailer and talent bios. Richard Pryor’s brilliant performance is worth the price of this disc.

114 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Mono); 2 DVD-5; Region One; Anchor Bay