Blue Collar
Paul Schrader (1978)
The crucial influence of Rust Belt voters on the outcome of this year’s presidential election gives Blue Collar a resonance beyond its original intentions – at least for a viewer seeing Paul Schrader’s debut feature for the first time in December 2016, as I did. The setting is the automobile industry in Detroit, Michigan in the mid-1970s, the very early years of the motor city’s protracted economic decline. Schrader and his brother Leonard, with whom he wrote the screenplay, deliver a twofold political message: (1) the capitalist industrial system subjugates and screws the workers; (2) in the US, labour unions are part of this corrupt system. Paul Schrader is belt-and-braces, to put it mildly, about conveying the message, which comes across loud and clear, in dialogue and incident. In case anyone has missed it, Schrader ends the film by repeating words spoken by Smokey James, one of the three main characters. Smokey has died in the meantime but his posthumous voiceover confirms that:
‘They pit the lifers against the new boys, the young against the old, the black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.’
The three auto workers at the centre of Blue Collar are two African Americans and one white man, from a Polish immigrant background. Smokey (Yaphet Kotto), Zeke Brown (Richard Pryor) and Jerry Bartowski (Harvey Keitel) are workmates and best mates. Zeke and Jerry have wives and kids; all three are struggling to make ends meet (Smokey is in debt to a loan shark). They therefore plan to rob a safe at the headquarters of their labour union. The theft yields slim cash pickings but the men discover a ledger containing evidence of the union’s links to organised crime and illegal loan operations. The trio’s attempt to blackmail the union has disastrous consequences. Smokey dies in a suspicious incident at the factory. The integrity of both Zeke and Jerry is seriously challenged and their friendship destroyed.
Every so often during the opening titles the frame freezes on an image of hard labour at the auto plant. It’s immediately clear that Paul Schrader means business, and to do it in bold face with double underlining (and I didn’t even recognise the song accompanying the titles: Captain Beefheart’s ‘Hard Workin’ Man’). Schrader’s orchestration of the various elements of the dehumanising working conditions – the massive machinery, the deafening noise – is impressive for a first-time director. But there’s a lack of fluidity in his handling of scenes that describe the principals’ lives outside work, in each other’s company and with their families, even though, at the start anyway, these seem meant to be relatively loose and natural. As might be expected from the screenplay credits, there’s some fine writing. (The lesser-known Leonard Schrader subsequently worked with his brother on the script for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. That film was released in the same year as Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, with a screenplay by Leonard adapted from Manuel Puig’s novel.) The dialogue is especially good when the Schraders blend political insight and humour – as, for example, when Zeke says of his place of work that ‘plant is short for plantation’. We get a good sense too of the men’s ambiguous attitude towards their labour union, which they treat as they might a close family member: they frequently slag the union off but bridle at an outsider’s doing so.
The sequence in which Smokey is asphyxiated in the paint shop at the plant is terrifyingly claustrophobic: convincingly realistic and eloquent as metaphor, this is the high point of Blue Collar. Unfortunately, it also turns out to be a point of no return: from this stage onwards, the moral conflicts and compromises forced on Zeke and Jerry are overblown in the manner of a wrestling-with-conscience 1950s melodrama. (Compared with the closing stages of Blue Collar, On the Waterfront is understated, as well as much more powerful.) Richard Pryor is imaginatively cast as Zeke; he and Yaphet Kotto both give interesting performances. Harvey Keitel the actor works almost as hard as the character he’s playing yet Keitel never seems to get inside Jerry or to bring him fully to life. Among the supporting cast, Harry Bellaver, playing a union boss, is particularly convincing – until the Schraders start using him as an ironic mouthpiece.
21 December 2016