It feels cold to write of someone who has been directing for 30 years that his first film is his best, but I have little hesitation in declaring BLUE COLLAR (1978; on a bill with LightSleeper) Schrader's strongest and sharpest movie to date. One of the few American commercial films to take a sustained, insightful, and informed look at the problems of workers, Blue Collar is stringent in its treatment of the dehumanization and occasional violence of an auto-assembly line, the financial pressures on the middle class, the need to escape through alcohol and cocaine. Schrader has, throughout his career, either cast brilliantly or been exceptionally fortunate in his actors, and Blue Collar, with its incendiary trio of Harvey Keitel, Richard Pryor, and Yaphet Kotto, marks a stunning beginning to this streak. Devoid of the stylistic flourishes of Schrader's later work, Blue Collar is aptly undistinguished-looking: the force of the direction is in its dry, detached observation of the characters' dilemmas and explosions.
The film culminates in an overwhelming futility that will be denied in the hopeful (or ironic-hopeful) endings of Hardcore, American Gigolo, and Light Sleeper. On the other hand, Blue Collar is more vivid, less perplexed than Schrader's later films, even as it anticipates them in its concern with betrayal and its portrait of characters who are forced by outside pressures both to become more lucid about their own predicament and to cooperate with the authorities.
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