Union Dues

By -- Richard Schickel

BLUE COLLAR

Directed by Paul Schrader

Screenplay by Paul Schrader

and Leonard Schrader

Blue Collar looks as if it might actually have been made by people who wear blue collars when they go to work, instead of turtlenecks, beads and suede jackets. That is to say, the picture is often awkward as it attempts to slice open the lives of some automobile-assembly-line workers and expose the futility of their existence. In the end, however, Blue Collar's lack of slickness, the sense it frequently conveys of being an authentic cry from the heart, gives it a certain distinction.

Sociologists and their journalistic popularizers have been having at the factory hands for some time now. Everyone knows by now that they suffer intense feelings of on-the-job anomie and alienation that show themselves in absenteeism, alcoholism and other unpleasantries. We have heard that they feel simultaneously exploited (by both their employers and their unions) and ignored (by the rest of society). But such matters are not much discussed in movies. Paul Schrader, previously best known as the writer of Taxi Driver, which dealt with another sort of disfranchisement, deserves high marks for originality as prime mover, director and co-writer of this new project.

He seems to have trouble with comedy. Early attempts to wring bitter laughter out of assembly-line conditions and the financial woes of the three central figures (Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto) do not entirely pay off. Still, these scenes help motivate the film's central incident, a robbery of their own union's safe in which the three turn up not the cash they wanted but a ledger hinting at various forms of venality and corruption. Their attempts to capitalize on the information are ambiguous: they would like to blackmail some money out of the union local, but knowing their leaders are corrupt also stirs reformist impulses in them, and it is their contrary feelings that provide the film's human interest and dramatic suspense. Finally, there is hell to pay. Kotto, playing a sometime small-time criminal, is murdered in a particularly grueling way. The union buys off Pryor with a shop steward's job. Keitel finally turns FBI stoolie. In short, their venture into crime and/or conscience, as one could predict from their earlier lives, ends with our heroes getting, as they would surely put it, screwed again. Indeed, at the film's close the two survivors have lost the one good thing in their lives --their sustaining camaraderie.

As a director, Schrader is lucky to have three strong men for his leading roles. Kotto, in particular, gives depth and an odd, worldly-wise dignity to his role as a man who is not as smart as he thinks he is, though in some ways is much wiser than he admits even to himself. None of them, though, gets as much help from Schrader as they could use. He has trouble finding the heart of a scene, trouble keeping the overall tone and tension of his film consistent. There is a power in this story he simply does not realize. Even so, the film shows an honest impulse to open up new realms of experience to the viewer, and there is nothing patronizing, no sense of sociopsychological slumming about it. Blue Collar may linger in the mind when a lot of slicker, more easily assimilated movies have passed .beyond recall.

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