'not reflective' of conditions at Checker.
Has a comfortable discovered there?
avowed radicalism, writes PAUL TICKELL.
in origin, and Zeke and Smoke, both black, work in a big plant plantation as Zeke calls it. Gerry and Zeke have families and are in a precarious financial position (though the women in Blue Collar strictly background).
The three decide to rob their union's safe, rationalising this decision by blaming the union bureaucrats for fighting enough on their behalf.
They get little money out of the but do find a notebook which details illegal loans made by the union Poople in pra bly as end Nia.
- probably the Mafia. The protagonists crushed the rush interested parties to recover the compromising book.
The union, which has ties with the local police, wants it back. The FBI wants to get hold of it so as to discredit corrupt or otherwise. unHOns.
The union bureaucracy Smoke murderco and buvs Zeke off - he is made shop steward.
INFORMER In order to stay alive, Gerry becomes an FBI informer.
are the political conclusions which Blue Collar draws from all this? The film certainly shows corrupt The brutalising effects of a long day in a factory, which the film intermittently depicts, are said to be non-exploitative extracting surplus value from the work-force been have links with organised crime car and collude with the state- in this case the police.
But such criticisms, however controversial matter might be for Hollyare wood, are founded on no more than an individualistic radicalIsm.
For instance, which the militant launches agains! bureaucracy are presented as integral to his character - the insights of a particular worker who happens to be humorous to and a good speaker at union meetings.
by Throughout the film the lines of class struggle are drawn between the union on one side and the working class on ine other. all Thus, in one scene a worker - and a real "character" has course - gives anarchic vent to This teelings by destroving a vending machine which a union steward reruses to have fixed. Blue Collar gives no hint as to what lies behind the union bureaucracy ownership of the factor!
Paul Schrader, the directo of the film, is at least aware that ine poncs or marvidualism are doomed this is one of the themes of Taxi Driver, he scripted for Martin Scorsese. way of subjectthe attacks Zeke his union The individual actions in Blue Collar — have read his Sartre - are seen as futile.
Smoke, for all his macho and some moments of glory with a baseball bat, goes under.
CENCE "strength', so do Zeke, though actually die.
This aspect deflates the Hollywood myth that the individual hero can take on the system and beat it.
But surely Blue Collar has set itself a wider task than this? It has the condition of a whole class in mind, as its very title, drawn from the coy jargon of technocrats implies.
However, the film remains and the locked in the which it partly criticises and its message seems to be: mess around with the system it's too big and powerful for you the individual.
wnich The fact that this message might be applicable individual but Schrader claims to certain working class, is way in which misicacing For cations vis-à-vis the and are CLas Gerry and apparent than in they don't film self-righteous out, set managers, struggle between LIS. individualism JUNGLE Don't jungle. to the It's always the morning after for Yaphet Kotto, Harvey Keitel, and Richard Pryor in *Blue Collar conditions, to the yet another the title The film's pessimistic impli- fittest.
The more the final Gerry 1S being escorted from the factory by working the FBI. He is confronted by a Zeke who accuses him of selling out.
Both, equally guilty of selling sum about each other's characteristics throats. The sound-over is the The repeat of an earlier piece of film's dialogue of Smoke's in which gives rise to history is seen as a fatalistic enclosed young and old. black and white, them and predestined Wel There is no class struggle, just one between victims of some unchanging law of the interest 1n indicated Here the ideology of the film is a throwback to the fatalism of late 19th century naturalistic fiction which imagised society of the animal kingdom; the survival of the film's pathological attention to detail is a further parallel with this earlier mode.
appreciation the Cass without perspective; it never progresses beyond detail: those who are blue collar are no more than the of their personal pessimism which the naturalistic ideology Is or a circular, kind: the working class are helpless and trapped, in to an eternal struggle without progress.
In using religious epithets to describe this pessimism, it's as note Schrader's Calvinistic upbringing and his liking for directors with an the mystical, a. by his book Transcendental Style in Film Not that it's a matter of looking to Schrader for a dose hope.
After all, there is some room for pessimism in the late "70s: the generalised alignment of left groups and the emergence of a strong working class party have not yet happened on the scale expected at the beginning of the present crisis. But there's still time.
FRUITLESS The рош about the claustrophobic pessimism of Blue Collar is that there 1s no time: the final frame of the film, catching Gerry and Zeke fruitless combat, ominously frozen, out of time As far as Schrader is concerned the working class, the blue collar, have no history - and TO TULIC.
BLUE COLLAR is showing at Gate 2, Brusnwick Square, London WC1 and is likely to be given a limited regional release.
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THE CREDITS at the end of Blue Collar' thank the police and the Michigan Checker Motor Corporation.
No, but liberal reviewers have found no difficulty in reconciling these obsequious credits with the film's First, the plot. Gerry, Polish | are like in the US and how they
ANARCHIC get