Paul Schrader, who wrote the dubious script of Taxi Driver and the undubiously awful script of The Yakuza, wrote [Blue Collar with his brother Leonard]…. The script has its waverings…. [Blue Collar] starts as a breezy comedy about three friends, two black men and a white man who work on the same assembly line, who bowl together with their wives and who ball with other women at cocaine parties. At the beginning the script handles their strapped financial situations farcically. A scene with an IRS man is an updated black remake of a similar scene in [Frank Capra's] You Can't Take It with You; then there's a comic robbery with ludicrous Halloween masks, a touch of [Mario Monicelli's] Big Deal on Madonna Street; then, because of something the three friends discover in the union local's safe that they rob, the script suddenly turns heavily dramatic; and then it...