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 w...

[The films of Paul Schrader] are difficult to get hold of. They are not only about contradictions, they deal in them. As often as not they employ shock effects that appear to pander to what the moralists among us would call our baser instincts…. Once upon a time when we went to the movies, there was never any doubt about what we were supposed to think. We knew who were the good guys and who were the bad. Some of this had to do with typecasting but, basically, it was the result of the laws laid down b...

[In Blue Collar Schrader] seems to have been influenced by both Godard and Antonioni—the former in the deadening ritual of the assembly line itself, and the latter in the chromatic utilization of industrial artifacts as art objects in their own right. The movie has an interesting look to it as Schrader tries to make a painterly comment on the pathetic bleakness of low-level industrial landscapes. But the pacing is something else again, as much of Blue Collar turns out to be stylistically and thematic...

Having now seen "American Gigolo," "Hardcore" and "Taxi Driver,"… I can't tell whether Mr. Schrader seizes on these sensational subjects because he is a canny picture-maker or because he is fascinated by moral sleaziness. I don't mean that he's just idly curious but that he is obsessed in the manner of a person who was brought up in a strict religious faith, as Mr. Schrader (Dutch Reformed Church) was, and somewhat late in life discovered...

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 I...

Without the compulsive plot mechanism that usually draws [Schrader's] characters ineluctably towards their destiny …, Cat People tends to disintegrate into a series of notations. That these in themselves remain watchable enough, and at times quite fascinating, is a testament—yet another paradox—to the extent that Schrader's transcendentalist cinema has transcended his own limitations as a writer. American Gigolo marked the point where the force-feeding of characters throug...

There's no American director who gives his movies a tonier buildup than Paul Schrader does. His interviews about his new "Cat People" … might make the picture seem mouth-watering to those who hadn't seen his "Blue Collar," "Hardcore," and "American Gigolo." But if you did see that last one you know his trouble: his movies are becoming almost as tony as the interviews…. Schrader is perfecting an apocalyptic swank. When his se...

[In Blue Collar, one feels that Paul Schrader] has a distinctive imagination and eye without as yet a sure directorial instinct. The discordant elements in the film—comedy, melodrama, social message—are imperfectly fused. But Blue Collar's vitality and drive generally prevail over technical flaws. It is continuously fresh, surprising, and absorbing…. Blue Collar, for all its documentary verve, does have two grievous faults. There is a grave disjunction in its internal logic. The ...