Review: Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar on Kino Lorber Blu-ray

Schrader’s lively and despairing first film as director has never been more relevant.

Blue CollarAudiences familiar with Paul Schrader’s customarily austere aesthetic may be surprised by the jocularity of his 1978 directorial debut, Blue Collar. Following three broke auto workers living in Detroit, the film has long passages of wittily profane, seemingly improvisatory dialogue that reveals the day-to-day tempo of the men’s lives, suggesting the scenes between the various cab drivers in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which Schrader wrote. One particularly audacious comic sequence sees Schrader expressing his characters’ desperation and poverty in a series of comic twists so evocatively absurd, sad, and politically enraged that they suggest a Buñuel set piece. Zeke (Richard Pryor), the angriest of the men, has been caught lying about the amount of children he has to the I.R.S., and so his wife, Caroline (Chip Fields) runs over to a neighbor’s house to grab more kids while he stalls an agent (Leonard Gaines). Riffing wildly, Zeke tries to tell the agent that his extra children have names such as Jim Brown and Sugar Ray. This sort of scene can scarcely be found in many of Schrader’s most famous films as director, and such playfulness was leeched entirely of his next directorial effort, the solemn, deadening Hardcore.

This liveliness, this tonal variety, is shrewdly utilized by Schrader as a form of misdirection. Blue Collar is driven by a tragic thesis, and it’s as bleak and furious as any film Schrader has made since, but it takes its time and allows you to get your guard down. There’s even a genre hook, which Schrader casually subverts. Zeke and his co-workers and drinking buddies, Jerry (Harvey Keitel) and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto), fed up with being exploited by the auto plant and their union, decide to rob the latter’s office. In a conventional film, even one with political ambitions, such a heist would generate thrills. For Schrader, the robbery is a banal, dryly funny spectacle—a humdrum extension of the trio’s frustrating lives. They come away with nearly nothing and inadvertently benefit the union, which lies about its losses for insurance money. This failure splinters the men, and this dissolution is what truly interests Schrader.

In most heist movies, criminals fall out over the ill-gotten booty. In Blue Collar, Zeke, Jerry, and Smokey are driven apart because they are expertly manipulated by larger social forces. The union turns the men against one another in order to nullify the threat of their potential unrest—a theme that couldn’t be more timely in an age in which we’re conditioned to despise one another for our political affiliations while monopolies are forged and vast quantities of money are controlled by fewer and fewer essential oligarchs. Yet Schrader, with his sense of comedy, with his innate grasp of the working-class textures of his characters’ lives, never renders this theme into a dull sermon. Blue Collar is a surprising and emotionally robust experience.

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Pryor, Kotto, and Keitel have a profoundly convincing chemistry, and Schrader modulates their performances with a confidence that would be impressive for anyone, let alone a first-time director. We’re always keyed into each man’s specific energy, and to how those energies coalesce when they’re together. Zeke is a livewire hothead, which allows Pryor to tap the same performative demons he channeled for stand-up, but Pryor’s performance doesn’t represent a mere change of setting, as his acting is a true, volatile expression of Zeke’s bitterness, which is channeled, via the character and the actor’s intelligence, into conversational riffs that suggest the “stand-up” of everyone’s regular lives. Kotto invests Smokey with a simmering, subtler intensity, while Keitel embodies the anxiety of the comparatively straight rational man—the odd man out among eccentrics in an extraordinary series of situations. (Schrader and the cast also understand these various dynamics to be informed by racial tension: Zeke and Smokey are African-American and Jerry is Caucasian, a difference in perspective and station that isn’t outwardly acknowledged until a devastating late scene between Zeke and Jerry.)

Blue Collar also features one of Schrader’s finest and most disturbing set pieces, in which his themes are expressed through a series of piercing physical gestures. Smokey is murdered by the union for his involvement in the theft, and he’s locked into a chamber where cars are spray-painted, with the fumes of the paint gradually suffocating and poisoning him. This is a wrenchingly protracted scene, showing Smokey as the life is gradually snuffed out of him, his struggles coming to nothing and drowned out by the chilling drone of the spray-paint apparatus. Schrader’s awareness of the finest details, especially the sound of the spraying of the paint, give this scene an uncanny, almost supernatural sense of cruelty, as Smokey comes to embody every person that every company has matter-of-factly annihilated.

Image/Sound

This transfer offers a clean, detailed, appropriately gritty image. Skin textures are vivid, as one can see the men sweating as they labor in the auto plant, and colors are lively, especially the silver of the chrome in the plant, which gleams with a white heat, testifying to the extremity of the working conditions. The sound mix is well balanced with a few show-pony qualities, such as the exhilaratingly rendered strings of Jack Nitzsche’s Bo Diddley-inspired score.

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Extras

The archive audio commentary by writer-director Paul Schrader and journalist Maitland McDonagh is a detailed and fascinating listen, especially for Schrader’s descriptions of working with his famously contentious leading men. Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto, and Harvey Keitel all worked differently and all resented one another, and Schrader felt that he had no control and was merely trying to “survive” the production. (Given this context, the amount of control that’s evident in the film is all the more remarkable.) Pryor would come into a scene hot from the first take and would soon flame out, while Keitel needed to warm up, so Schrader was often shooting Pryor’s first take and Keitel’s, say, 10th, which was achieved by having Keitel rehearse separately. Pryor had racial resentments, and would provoke his co-stars, possibly to stimulate himself artistically, while every actor suspected the other to be the true star of the production. These conditions informed the formal qualities of Blue Collar as well, as the camera rarely moves, mostly because Schrader had trouble getting coverage. (Austere camera movements would soon become a signature of his aesthetic.) Interestingly enough, Pryor eventually said that he wanted Schrader to make a movie about his life, claiming he was the only director who understood him. This commentary is the only supplement on this disc, but it offers a rich glimpse into a film that deserves more attention.

Overall

Paul Schrader’s lively and despairing first film as director has never been more relevant, and this disc should hopefully lift it from undeserved semi-obscurity.

Score: 
 Cast: Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Ed Begley Jr., Harry Bellaver, George Memmoli, Lucy Saroyan, Lane Smith, Cliff DeYoung, Borah Silver, Chip Fields, Leonard Gaines  Director: Paul Schrader  Screenwriter: Paul Schrader, Leonard Schrader  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 114 min  Rating: R  Year: 1978  Release Date: December 10, 2019  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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