Blue Collar

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

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.

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

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

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

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]

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.