While watching Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar, one gets the feeling this is a film that attempts to encapsulate and critique many of its current-day conditions. The backdrop is the late 1970s, when America’s economy was teetering due to oil crises, recessions and other uncertainties, the recent Watergate scandal left a permanent scar on many Americans’ perception of the government and its relationship to the people and the end of the Vietnam War brought home thousands of disaffected soldiers to a society that tended to view them as either ‘baby killers’ or men who had sacrificed greatly but could not fully adapt into a rapdily changing world. In any case, empathy was not on many peoples’s minds, if only because of the more immediate problems they faced within their own lives, such as economic shortcomings and tightening employment conditions. Much of Schrader’s early work focuses on marginalized figures of society at a time when little in society seemed to glitter and hardly anyone was willing or able to reach out and assist one another. His films display anger, resentment, vindictiveness and a relentless passion for serving justice that is particularly striking today, yet did not result in conventional success at the box-office or make him a household name. One of the hallmarks of Schrader’s career is his innate ability to get a film made at whatever cost (or lack thereof) or sacrifice is needed. Little of his work has made considerable profits, yet he continues not only to write and direct movies but is willing to go to any lengths to see them accomplished. However, in late 1970s Hollywood, when the last embers of the ‘American New Wave’ still glowed, it was at least plausible that someone could get financing for a story about three Detroit autoworkers attempting to rob their union in order to pay off their debts and maintain some form of self-reliance. Blue Collar was not a financial juggernaut, or even a steady money-maker, but it was able to make enough (due to it being released in enough theaters for a long enough duration) for Schrader to continue working and carry on the themes from which his career had flowered and continue to serve him to the present day.

Despite being his first directorial job, Blue Collar‘s themes of angry, frustrated men looking for an outlet to deal with their feelings had roots in Schrader’s earliest work and would continue to develop in future films. After selling a script about the Japanese mafia co-written with his brother (The Yakuza) and doing a modern retelling of Hitchcock’s Vertigo with Brian De Palma, Schrader’s script of a lonely, depressed war veteran suffering from insomnia who takes up taxi driving as a way of coping with his social awkwardness was filmed by Martin Scorsese and received enormous critical acclaim. As a result of the movie economic model at the time, this got investors interested enough not only to finance another script of Schrader’s but to allow him to direct. Given the themes of his previous work, Blue Collar does not fit neatly within their parameters. There is significantly more plot here than either Taxi Driver or Obsession as it focuses on the minutiae of the workers’ daily grind and their inability to improve their situations. The first half covers each of the three autoworkers’ personal problems, then gives them an opportunity to make their lives easier, only for the second half to show everything come apart in terribly fatalistic and somewhat unsurprising fashion. As Schrader noted in a 1982 interview, the decision to rely on so much plottingin a straightforward manner was done out of self-preservation, as a way to ensure that the film would be saved from any obvious shortcomings. By following three different characters and dovetailing their arcs, Schrader believed he would protect himself from not being able to make another movie if his first was accessible enough to producers and fianciers.

In recent years, Schrader has noted how difficult shooting Blue Collar was, due in large part to the egos of the actors, specifically Richard Pryor. In a 2016 interview, Schrader said Pryor wanted to be “the biggest and blackest actor,” referring to his perceived inability to reconcile newfound stardom with the obligations he felt towards the black community. While drugs were almost certainly a factor for the on-set tensions, the chemistry between Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto shows very little animosity. Instead, there is a strong sense of camaraderie and brotherhood as these men are bound together by their job and their futile circumstances. The ‘message’ of the film would seem to be anti-union, yet it could also be understood as simply anti-corruption. The story of under-privileged workers fighting corrupt bosses has been a mainstay in Hollywood. Schrader’s twist, making the union blatantly crooked and willing to go to great lengths to silence its own members, must have spoken volumes to many blue collar workers at the time, as well as a general public all too familiar with high-level corruption in Watergate and the Vietnam War. Since the 1980s, the notion that unions are more interested in political gain and self-interest than protecting workers’ rights has gained leverage and made them less favorable to the public. Forty years after its release, Blue Collar‘s commentary on corruption remains relevant and Schrader’s style, while still very green, shows the potential for important, relatable storytelling.