Directed by Paul Schrader
Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.
Akkord am Fließband, Detroit - Avdeling 291, Vivendo na Corda Bamba, Blue Collar - Kampf am Fließband, Tuta blu, Jóbarátok(1978), 蓝领阶级, Niebieskie kołnierzyki, Θανάσιμη απειλή, Blue Collar (Sed de Poder), Конвейер, אנשי הצווארון הכחול, 블루 칼라, Mavi Tasma, 藍領階級, Avdelning 291 - Detroit, Плава крагна
Italy Pesaro Film Festival 
USAR 
France 
Germany16 
Netherlands12 FranceTP Netherlands12 Italy Netherlands12 France Germany Italy Netherlands USA 
character in this named “Dogshit Miller” and you’re telling me paul schrader isn’t one of the best screenwriters to ever do it?
Neck and neck with HALLOWEEN for best American film of 1978. Notable for being the knife handle to Carpenter’s blade. Fascinating in the way Schrader unreservedly sprays his venom at every institution and abstract concept he can think of: capitalism, management, unions, the justice system, technology. I wish the 70s were longer in part so we could have seen more films like this and fewer consumed by the gauzy, gauche excess of the decade that followed. With Schrader, the dingier (LIGHT SLEEPER; AUTOFOCUS; FIRST REFORMED), usually the better.
Not only Schrader's best film but has the honor of being the only film to feature a dildo fight between Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
"They pit the lifers against the new boy and the young against the old. The black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place."
A pretty fun movie about some working-class buds getting fed up with their wages and working conditions and attempting to get one over on the man so that they can afford their mortgages and basic dental care until suddenly the class/racial tensions and power contradictions that money exacerbates become too much to bear. The whole thing is a bit grim and cynical about organized labor but the characters are richly performed and Schrader has the style to back it up when this gets dark, and it does. Honestly has one of the scariest death scenes I think I've seen in any movie, one that is all the more effective because of how charismatic Pryor and Kotto are in the first half.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
92/100
Second viewing, no change. Feels like New Hollywood's last gasp—astonishingly blunt and despairing, yet also bursting with style and energy right from the opening credit sequence, in which a freeze-frame accompanies each breakdown in Captain Beefheart's "Hard Workin' Man," the song's stop-time beat retained solely by the sound of clanking machinery. Schrader gets us to drop our guard via plentiful humor, letting Pryor semi-improvise his way through the IRS dude's visit and giving the trio hilariously dopey disguises (which we don't see or even hear discussed until they're donned) during the robbery. For a long time, Blue Collar plays like a genial stick-it-to-The-Man comedy with an undercurrent of genuine outrage, which makes its abrupt plummet into hell all the…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
A guy gets killed with PAINT in this movie, one of the most upsetting death scenes I’ve seen in years. Schrader you maniac
Also not surprising but worth mentioning Richard Pryor is an incredible dramatic actor
Grim irony casts a pall over this movie in the juxtaposition of workers' fierce defense of and pride in their union membership and increasing rage and hopelessness that comes with that same union's failure to keep pace with needs. As Pryor's Zeke says, higher wages are just a small part of overall labor necessities. Three of these workers decide to take what's theirs by robbing not their boss, but their union office, and soon find themselves embroiled in a nightmare scenario in which they are trapped by various systems and hunted most viciously of all by those meant to protect them.
Schrader mercilessly triangulates the characters' precarious situation by the forces that stymie them: the government looming around every corner…
I’m not sure there’s anything I can say about this movie that hasn’t already been said before. It’s a sharp, cutting and deeply cynical look at the way that American institutions fail ordinary workers, whether it is the government that’s supposed to represent them or the labor unions that are supposed to fight for them. But this failure has a point; it’s part of a web of relations that are meant to keep workers, as Smokey says, “in their place.”
I am most struck by the way that Schrader captures with unusual precision the way that racism actually works to segment the working-class. It’s more than simple prejudice and individual bigotry. Indeed, if it were just prejudice and bigotry I…
A great movie about organized labour because it’s about solidarity, and the factors that break it.
"Fuck Uncle Sam, man!"
Death on the installment plan. American working class life as this continuous materialist drudgery. Everything as one large sham that perpetuates itself. It is kept together and watchable by the easygoing of the three leads chemistry. Schrader's direction is concentrated and punishing (that protected death scene is a marvel). Reportedly he and Pryor got along as bad as a director and its star could, but the film is really animated by their meeting, the very controlled framing of Schrader's images, that allow no freedom whatsover for his characters and Pryor satiristic instincts applied for a rage fueled serious turn. The blocking and performance in a constant struggle, Like the movie itself. "Maybe I'll go to Canada. Can't be any worse there."
nice movies don't tend to age well.
you can say many things about paul schrader, not all of them positive, but no one would ever accuse him of being an optimist. his movies are all marked by a cynicism about human nature- this man does not let people off the hook. he doesn't soften, he doesn't make concessions, he doesn't give brief glimmers of hope. life sucks and then you die.
it doesn't work for all media but it works here. this movie doesn't chicken out at any moment. there's plenty of places where it could maybe admit that hey, you know what? being a working man isn't so bad. zeke and smokey and jerry could have had recourse, they…
They should have united against their common enemy: the car
