Blue Collar

It is an angry, radical movie about the vise that traps workers between big industry and big labor. It's also an enormously entertaining movie; it earns its comparison with On the Waterfront. And it's an extraordinary directing debut for Paul Schrader, whose credits include Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder. Read full review

Paul Schrader's directorial debut is an artistic triumph. Schrader has transformed a carefully researched original screenplay penned by him and his brother Leonard into a powerful, gritty, seamless profile of three automobile assembly line workers banging their heads against the monotony and corruption that is the factory system. Read full review

Pryor’s best film and his best performance and that’s not taking anything anyway from his co-stars Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto. Read full review

At first, Blue Collar looks like an interracial buddy movie. Then it shows signs of becoming a caper comedy. Finally - and powerfully - it turns out to be that rarest of Hollywood commodities, a genuinely political film. And a damned good one at that. [13 Feb 1978, p.98]

Pryor has a lot of funny moments in Blue Collar, especially in the first half or so, when the movie tends toward angry comedy. Read full review

Very probably the most clear-sighted movie ever made about the ways that shopfloor workers get f.cked over by the system. Read full review

Suffused with the pessimism of Taxi Driver, Blue Collar is one of the most brutally honest films to have come out of 70s Hollywood. Read full review

The movie is affecting as a social portrait as well as a psychological drama. Read full review

The three leads--particularly Pryor, in an essentially non-comedic role--are remarkable. Read full review

Like the Dustin Hoffman film Straight Time, Schrader's picture sustains a certain interest despite its faults. You stick with both movies because of the promise of something authentic and tragically revealing, even though the promise is never fulfilled. These films don't really work, but they're the sort of films that don't work in interesting ways. [24 Mar 1978, p.D1]

The pictures seems dogged and methodical, though it is graced with a beautiful performance by Kotto.

Is Blue Collar an action film or a meditation upon the American Dream? I suspect it wants to be both though it's not very serious at being either. Read full review