Last month I got a lift when I learned Blue Collar–Paul Schrader’s 1978 movie about working class lifers and union corruption–unsettled a group of middle class city kids who’d never seen the inside of a factory. Their weightier-than-woke response to a screening of the movie in NYC hints it remains a model of popular realist art.
The fact that Blue Collar still works forty years on is due chiefly to the performances by Yaphet Kotto, Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel. Pryor was on the verge of superstardom in ’78, but he didn’t hijack the movie. All three actors went for something deeper than Hollywood instinct/star power as they did justice to the dailiness of their characters’ lives…
In one sequence we watch Keitel’s face as he stares unbelievingly at his daughter, having discovered that she has mutilated her mouth with homemade wire braces. The child, supercharged with dreams of drum-majorette stardom, has been rejected because of buck teeth by her school marching corps. (No money in the budget for an orthodontist.) Feelings come in a rush–helplessness, pity, confusion, anger, awe. But in the corner of the actor’s eye, or in the frown, you also sense determination–a refusal not to attempt to understand–The System is responsible, but still…my daughter did this to herself. So what is the System? Is the System us?
The critic who clocked Keitel’s flow of feeling shared the actor’s “refusal not to attempt to understand.”[1] Director Schrader deserves props for giving Keitel and his other actors a chance to think on screen, but his script ended up squeezing their mindfulness into a doomy, simplistic anti-union template. Mark Dudzic notes flaws in the movie’s plot/conception as he muses below on his own ambivalent response to Schrader’s foray into the world of Detroit auto-workers…
I love/hate that movie! Love the scenes shot inside the Checker plant, the portrayal of the friendship between Pryor, Keitel and and Kotto, their family lives and the roiling anger and alienation on the shop floor. The scene with Keitel on the overpass after Smokey (Kotto) was murdered in the paint booth was really powerful. And the soundtrack was pretty good too, if I recall correctly. Hated the facile presentation of union corruption as a plot device playing into stereotypes and “accepted wisdom.” Too bad Schrader didn’t have the courage and vision to portray a more complex story of co-option and compromise that would have been a more accurate picture of most workers’ relationship to their unions in the “roaring 70s.” A couple of years after the movie came out, the UAW negotiated its first concessionary contract with Chrysler as a condition of federal bailout monies, inaugurating a whole era of concession bargaining. Now that’s a story of corruption and betrayal worth telling (including, ultimately, the descent of the UAW–which was known as the cleanest union in America back in the ’70s–into the kind of blatant corruption and thievery portrayed in the movie). Interesting factoid (at least for us union geeks): the Checker Motors plant portrayed in the movie was actually represented by the Allied Industrial Workers, not the UAW.
Editor’s Addendum: Back in ’78 New York Times film critic Vincent Canby found it impossible to suspend disbelief in the interracial friendship between the workers played by Pryor and Keitel. I mentioned that to Dudzic who responded:
Probably because Canby worked in an all-white workplace :-). Reminds me of the time when the DC Labor Film-Fest hosted John Sayles for a screening of Matewan. A young McWokey leftie questioned the portrayal of the James Earl Jones character and accused Sayles of injecting a romanticized notion of racial unity against the historical reality of an unremittingly racist white working class. “Actually the Few Clothes character was a real historical figure,” replied Sayles. “He came out of the Alabama coalfields, which had a strong history of multi-racial organizing. This was the official policy of the UMWA and the key to their organizing half a million coal miners and becoming the strongest union in the U.S. in the years before WW II.”
Canby’s doubts may have jumped out at me when I read his film review in the moment because in 1978 my brother Tom was working at the 125th St. post office in Harlem (where he’d make plenty of black friends over the next thirty years). Before that, he hung out with a multi-culti crew he’d run into on the night tour at the General Post Office on 34th street. I’m just now reminded many workers on that GPO shift were deaf and relied on sign language to communicate. I’m guessing their presence may have served to slightly diminish the salience of racial and ethnic differences among their fellow workers. Not that brother Tom ever came to imagine class trumps race and ethnicity in America. But ya gotta believe!?
Notes
1 The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Class. (1990) by Benjamin DeMott.