Fresh off his screenwriting success with TAXI DRIVER, Paul Schrader made his directorial debut with this one, which he also co-wrote with his brother Leonard. Part crime caper flick, part satire, and part stick-it-to-the-man flick, BLUE COLLAR is about 3 Rust Belt factory worker friends, Zeke, Jerry, and Smokey,slaving in an auto factory, who decide to rip off the company they work for. They don't find much money, but they do find a ledger that reveals the books are being cooked, and that their union has some solid ties to organized crime. So the multicultural homeboys decide to, well, stick-it-to-the-man. When Smokey dies under suspicious circumstances, shit gets real. Soon the feds are on Zeke, the groups defacto leader, to testify against the union, and the union is on him to give up the goods, causing a rift between him and the remaining Jerry.
Filming BLUE COLLAR was apparently even more drama ridden than the film itself. The lead actors, Richard Pryor, Harvey Kietel, and Yaphet Kotto, were said to have hated each other. factor in Pryor being coked out of his mind, and if stories are true, at one point actually threatened writer/director Schrader with a gun, proclaiming that he "aint gonna do more than three takes!" it's a wonder this film was completed, much less came out as amazing as it did. That can likely be chalked up to Schrader being on fire at the time, his talent bringing the project together, be damned the distractions and detractions. Schrader wound up suffering a nervous breakdown over it all, but he brought a film to screens that should be much more heralded than it is. Considered an unsung classic among film geeks, this is one great piece of American film making through and through. Out of pressure, diamonds are formed, and BLUE COLLAR is one of the crown jewels of releases from 1978.
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