Blue Collar has to be one of the most dogged pictures ever produced. Making his début as a director, Paul Schrader, the phenomenally successful young screenwriter, has approached directing as a painful, necessary ritual—the ultimate overdue term paper. He goes at it methodically, and gets through it with honors but without flair, humor, believability. Blue Collar is an exercise, an idea film in which each scene makes its point and is over. (p. 406)
Blue Collar says that the system grinds all workers down, that it destroys their humanity and their hopes. At the start, under the titles, there's the ominous, heavy rock beat of "Hard Workin' Man"—like the hammer of oppression. The music is calculatedly relentless. It's to make us feel the throbbing noise of the assembly line, so that we'll grasp how closed-in the men's universe is. Noise isn't just noise in this movie, it's fate. The meaning of Blue Collar is in its dark, neon tones, its pounding inexorability, its nighttime fatalism. There's no feeling of fresh air, and even the sunlight has a suggestion of purgatory. The film noir style of nightmare realism, which in the thirties and forties was used in high-strung thrillers about loners in the city or outlaws on the lam or prisoners threatened by brutal guards or innocents who got on the wrong side of the law and were hounded, is here applied to American blue-collar workers. When Jerry, thinking to escape from the blackmail mess, says "Maybe I'll go to Canada," he gets the classic film noir answer—"Wherever you go they'll find you." Smokey, in the deep voice of a man who knows, spells out the conditions in the automotive industry: "Everything they do, the way they pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the black against the white, is meant to keep us in our place." And when at the end Zeke and Jerry raise their arms against each other it's the proof that they were pre-ordained to be victims and that the system has won. In all probability, the automotive industry wants to keep the assembly lines running, and doesn't want any dissension among the men which might slow the lines down. But this film's jukebox Marxism carries the kind of cynical, tough-minded charge that encourages people in the audience to yell "Right on!"
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