Paul Schrader: Blue Collar

Paul Schrader's Blue Collar: ...And May The Greatest Opportunist Win

(United States, 1978)

A devastating, and great film, unfortunately more discussed than seen or known at this late date.

Blue Collar is celebrated for a number of reasons - the casting is inspired, subverting a standard Hollywood racial casting formula, and director/writer Paul Schrader (his directorial debut; Schrader was already known for writing Taxi Driver) gets unforgettable performances from three leads who apparently didn't much care for each other. Richard Pryor - justifiably famous as a comic - was given few opportunities to display his skill as a dramatic actor, and Blue Collar quickly makes apparent the tragedy of that state of affairs: Pryor's on-screen moments here are electrifying - a tour-de-force of controlled nuances as his character (Zeke) evolves through a million evolutions of moral self-doubt, debate and an eventual corruption; you know this latter outcome will have to be inevitable (as foreshadowed in Zeke's many nervous and angsty moments), even as Zeke seems to fight to hang on to his own ethics. Larger forces are conspiring against him - business, industry, commerce, even the criminal underworld are moving in a specific sort of orchestration, and the fight of this character (and his two equally desperate collegues) to emerge from a simple heist scenario spun wildly out of control is the core of this Machiavellian drama.

From the start, Schrader manages the story very precisely - building drama very carefully, with methodical pacing, sharp and realistic dialogue, and a suitably grimy, documentary-real glimpse of post-industrial decay as it creeps into everyone's day-to-day existances: dirty and raw, filled with unsolveable moral conundrums and a simmering rage over expectations shattered. The musical backdrop for the opening scenes - Muddy Waters' Mannish Boy - effectively sets a mood for the film: sledgehammer blues, harsh and raw, with a sense of rhythm that (in it's utilitarian brutality) evokes industrial processes and sounds, while referring - in oblique fashion - to the men that would be employed by that same industry - degraded, taken for granted, and stripped of a sense of honor perhaps intuitively bound to a sense of masculinity, should a presumed need for such a manipulation surface within the machinations of industry.

Thus established, Schrader's story - which at first might seem to be just another indictment of "the system" or big business (or unions) having their way with the working class - manages instead to inch towards some darker ironies: that mythologized working class may not neccessarily be any more loyal, or moral, than the upper classes that are - in fact - brazenly shafting them - and as the film moves into it's latter half, this nasty paradox, fleshed out with off-the-cuff gallows humor that Pryor (and also Keitel and Kotto) supplies turns the narrative into something ever more claustrophobic.

And alas - yet another irony of this film would be it's general unavailability with the passage of time, as the film has lost (unfortunately) less of its' relevance than one would have hoped. A great film.